Origin of COVID-19

The origin of COVID-19 or the underlying virus is fundamentally a scientific question, as soon as the disease emerged.  It gets immensely complicated when it is muddled with a political question.

Humans have had diseases and pandemics throughout history.  The black plague, smallpox, cholera, influenza, AIDS, etc.  Because most happened so long ago, studying their origins is purely academic and elicits neither wide attention nor much controversy.  This is unlike COVID-19 disease, which is ongoing and highly politicized to attack China.  But even if one wants to make a political case, he still has to look at science as well as history.  

Scientists are still trying to figure out where the virus came from or jumped to humans.  People have been able to trace pathogens or diseases many years before they were first recognized.  For example, first AIDS/HIV samples can now be retrospectively identified around 1900, and first US cases in the 1960s, even though it broke out in the US around 1980.   So, even though COVID-19 was first found in Wuhan in Dec 2019, it might well have been around for a while, even years, in Wuhan or elsewhere.  This will take a long time to figure out, so the current feverish search has settled nothing.  

Even when we eventually identify the so-called patient 0 or the first case, we still have an essential question: since the virus can’t appear out of thin air, how did it come around?  It must have its parents, its parents their own parents, on and on, same with the animal carries.  This situation is unlike the case of Hitler and his parents: Hitler was born harmless, but COVID-19 harmful the minute it appears.  Its immediate predecessor or parent might be 99.9% identical to COVID-19 virus; even if it is not itself dangerous, it is still the necessary step upon which COVID-19 exists.  And then its predecessor, etc.  One can go to the end of the world not finding the answers, since they are truly open-ended, but without such answers, the origin question is never settled.  

So in other words, the true origin of COVID-19 (and other pandemics) might never be satisfyingly nailed down in science.  This leaves one with a gushing hole for any political answer.  But because we may never know the origin, the next best solution is to just focus on the first outbreak, or where it was first identified. 

   

This solution is convenient, but if one wants to use this to blame China, then he faces a mountain of obstacles in history.  Because historically many pandemics didn’t break out in China; even if China could be retrospectively linked, according to the aforementioned criterion, China didn’t have the most obvious or major outbreak, so the blame must be on the other countries.  But did or does anybody get attacked for the previous pandemics?  

Furthermore, for smallpox, influenza, AIDS, and COVID-19, etc, a virus hijacks the human cells and body to cause diseases, and jumps out of the hostage without his or her noticing.  The virus doesn't have any ID card or passport, and humans are simply the hijacked victims.  Does anybody seriously blame a hostage?  Only because you don't see the hijacker?

  

So history is not on the side of the Sinophobia either.  The only talking point left is, hence, a common refrain: China was hiding something, which wasted us time to prevent COVID-19. 

This accusation is open-ended and hard to dispel.  Being a Monday-morning-quarterback, one can always find faults in anything, even though in previous pandemics nobody reacted with any such vigor.  In reality, China had the excuse of not knowing the virus at first, with COVID-19 occurring in the confusing mid of cold and flu season, but China identified the virus first and enacted containment measures, all within 4 weeks’ time.  Finding cases earlier than Dec 2019 is meaningless in terms of disease control, since we can also discover old HIV samples from the 1960s or 1900s.  Identifying the virus is crucial, because only after that can one correctly diagnose COVID-19 and differentiate from cold and flu.

One can question whether 4 weeks’ time is too long.  But it is actually two weeks: from sequencing the virus in early Jan to Jan 20-23, when the Wuhan lockdown was announced.   A few things happened during that period of time.  Based on the new viral sequence one had to design and make test kits.  The new kits must undergo quality controls, get tested themselves, and mass produced.  All these took time.  Then patients needed to be identified.  Retrospectively a few hundreds were already infected.  But based on what we now know, some patients show no or mild symptoms, especially at the early stage of COVID-19.  And it is certain that cold and flu patients vastly outnumbered COVID-19 patients then.   By Jan 20 it was announced that human-to-human transmission occurred, and since voluntary travel restriction was not possible, lockdown was imposed on Jan 23.   

Critics will still claim two week’s time is still too long, or China provided wrong information.  Although it is very hard to see what wrong information China could have provided.  Virus sequence was wrong?  Or whether there was or wasn’t human-to-human transmission?  The latter controversy had always been based on the best information at the time, reported and debated openly in real time before Jan 20, and well dissected since then.  Or China didn’t really impose a lockdown?

Judging what China did in a vacuum is folly, as one must compare with what the countries where most those critics reside responded to COVID-19 themselves.  Since Feb 20-Mar 1, many European countries and the US have had outbreaks, some confirmed cases exceeding China’s.  That was 4 weeks past Jan 23 and without any of the excuses China had before.  Even if one thought COVID-19 was all China’s problem, when the lockdown measures unprecedented in human history were enacted on Jan 23, does China still need to mail everybody a postcard to inform the seriousness of COVID-19?  By analogy, when 911 happened, did any airport in the world still need prodding to beef up security?  

The best fallback from China critics now is COVID-19 patients left China earlier than thought.  Yet this reflects more on the nature of COVID-19 than China’s response, because HIV also spread earlier than 1980.  In truth, the current affair or debate concerning COVID-19 origin is never scientific but political.  The undertone of China’s critics is always ideological, so COVID-19 is merely a cheap exercise.   Initially, before Feb 20, the theme was only China could have screwed up in their own country (we would never do).  After Feb 20, it becomes we screwed up but it is all China’s fault.  But if ideology is truly to blame, did Europe or US respond to COVID-19 any better than China, even though most of these countries are technologically more advanced, less populated, minus the discovery phase China went through?    Going one step further, if COVID-19 had broke out in one of these countries, can anybody be certain that it would have performed any better than China, given how awfully they were unprepared even with so much information already available?

Origin of COVID-19 is a valid scientific and medical problem.  Understanding it is important to prevent future outbreaks.  Mixing it up with politics, however, hurts humanity, which is already abundantly clear in the brief history of COVID-19.  Because what is lacking in the debate of COVID-19 origin is historical perspectives, sound logic and reasoning.  It will persist after COVID-19 has passed.  

Note on 4/29/20: NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on 4/28/20: “I know … people are feeling emotional, but emotions can’t drive a reopening process, ... We have to separate the emotion from the logic.”(https://www.yahoo.com/news/as-states-move-to-reopen-covid-19-death-rate-numbers-raise-a-red-flag-153852997.html).  He was talking about reopening, but I'm sure his words will be used much more.