Bat or lab
I have another two topics in the pipeline (well, my brain cells), working titles being “Xi’s China might have been a rival to the US, but Trump the real threat”, and “(Enough with the ‘Awakened Dragon’) Today’s China is merely of US’ own making”, respectively.
But I reckoned I should start writing about a topic, which had stuck in my head since about eighteen months ago and which, to this date, remains a current event: COVID-19, as its latest developments are somewhat intriguing.
In the evening of the 24th January 2020, which was the 2020 lunar new year’s eve, I had dinner with two of my Chinese friends, (Ms) Z and (Mr) W who at the same time were my university classmates, at the Old Town Hong Kong restaurant in Barangaroo, Sydney. Wuhan, the central China city which was more than 8,000 kilometres away from where we were sitting, had just snapped into a lockdown the day prior, thanks to a coronavirus outbreak. The conversation between the three of us was inevitably all about this hot topic.
There were of course reminiscences of the 2003 SARS outbreak. But our three’s recollections were vastly different: Z was already in Sydney, studying for her postgraduate degree; Australia had a handful of imported cases, and got through the health crisis unscathed. W and I, during that tumultuous time, were still living in the Guangdong province, the epic centre at the early stage of the outbreak. Unlike W, whose movements were mostly confined to the metropolitan Guangzhou, my job back then as an external auditor, required me to make inter-city — or even inter-province — travels, even during the high of the epidemic. While to this stage of this ongoing COVID-19 saga, most of us would have gone through mask-wearing, social distancing, travel restrictions and even lockdown, none of those existed back in 2003. Being in my early twenties and thinking myself as “ten feet tall and bulletproof”, I was not really concerned, and did not see SARS as an imminent threat — needless to say, mainland China’s heavy-handed censorship had led to a certain degree of ignorance.
On top of everything else, my impression of the SARS outbreak was that it ended fairly quickly — to be specific, I felt that the episode was over in just a few months’ time. Therefore, I walked away from the dinner that night, thinking the whole thing would have gone out of the window by summertime in the Northern Hemisphere.
But just as investment disclaimers would usually put, “Past performance is not indicative of future results…”, eighteen months into the pandemic, the novel coronavirus has reaped through very corners of the world and is still raging in many places.
Other than the underestimation of the virus by myself, and by hundreds of millions of others, COVID-19 has uncovered the embarrassing fact that no country, even those claimed to have the best healthcare systems, was well-prepared for a public health crisis like this one.
The pandemic has also exposed how divided our communities could become, on matters such as how our governments should tackle outbreaks — well, maybe not so divisive for the China Chinese. When Wuhan had just gone into lockdown, the Western world were looking at it with curiosity, some with (stereotypical) criticism — I learned a new word “draconian”. Ironically, that measure was later adopted, to various extents, by the rest of globe, even including the “Great America”, which sits completely opposite to China, on the other end of the “Liberty vs Control” spectrum.
But when the majority of the world were still struggling to “flatten the curve”, it appeared that China had straightened, or beaten, the curve only a few months later! That seemed incredible because of, on the one hand, the grim outlook projected by Wuhan at the outset, and on the other hand, the Chinese government being perceived master of understatement and number massaging, when it comes to disclosing the severity of a disaster. Therefore, when my partner asked whether I believed China had contained the virus, I could only say “I don’t know what to believe” — and I would not go on about them excluding the number of ‘asymptomatic cases’ from its tally.
However, I started piecing things together, for a clearer picture of what measures China had taken to contain COVID-19 transmission. At the inception of the Wuhan lockdown, another piece of news, that also wowed the world, was that two hospitals were built from scratch within thirteen days. While everyone else was being marvelled by the speed of constructions, a few words had captured my attention, which yet appeared to have been lost in translation: in Chinese news reporting, it was always mentioned that the two new hospitals would be used to accommodate and treat COVID-19 patients “with mild symptoms”. It sounded odd to me, but I did not know why, as I did not ponder. Then video footages started circulating, which allegedly showed people, screaming and kicking, being forcibly taken away from their residence, by several personnel in full protection gear. Yet I had failed to link those two dots together with China’s containment, until a few months later, when I came across the news that a US presidential election poll worker still worked at his polling site, despite having been tested positive for the coronavirus.
Then I realised, the key to China’s ‘success’ was ‘lock-up’, instead of ‘lock-down’. Imagine the same group of personnel appearing at the driveway of a house in the US, and attempting to fetch and take residents into quarantine, they would have been gunned down, even before they could reach the front porch.
Apparently, being closer and closer to mirroring its motherland’s behaviours, Hong Kong had finally followed suit to end its months long fourth wave of community transmission.
It should be noted though, that China has been able to get the epidemic under control, also owing a great deal to its policies to keep foreigners away. But that will have to change in fewer than 200 days: the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
The recent surge in daily new cases in Tokyo and nationwide in Japan had cast doubt on whether the Tokyo Olympics should still go ahead. Then the Olympic Games organiser decided to ban all fans — except for the cycling road matches, as far as I could see on TV — from this year’s Games. As such, the Tokyo 2020 finally forged ahead in the year 2021 and kicked off to a vastly empty stadium.
If we take a look back at the data from one year ago, we will see that, in terms of daily new cases, Tokyo, Japan, and the globe, are actually in a worse place than they were twelve months ago, let alone in the late March 2020 when the decision to postpone the Games was made. Apparently, no one is out of the woods, yet.
So, what has changed, given that the reason cited for the postponement was to ‘ensure athlete safety’?
Well, we — not necessarily every one of us though — might have gone through the various stages of ignoring, suspecting, denying, even panicking, and then acknowledging and accepting — some may still be in the first few stages, or stay there forever — the COVID-19 pandemic. We also know better now what is required of us to keep ourselves and others safe. Most importantly of all, we have got vaccines that work, well, to various degrees; hence we have been told to learn to live with the virus.
But that is NOT what the Chinese authorities have in mind. Their ‘zero tolerance’ mindset on transmission has prompted them to always fall back into the ‘go fast, go harsh’ measures: an outbreak in late May and early June this year, in Guangzhou’s Liwan district, where I grew up and where my parent’s mainland Chinese residence is located, had seen the district’s entire population, of more than one million, ordered to get tested in a 72-hour timeframe. In addition, masses of neighbourhoods had to go into a hard lockdown.
One could not help but wonder, ‘how would that kind of tactics (of tackling COVID-19) fit into the running of the Winter Olympics?’ All personnel at the Tokyo Games have soldiered on, undeterred by positive cases reported in the athlete village. However, by searches on the Games’ official website, one could find a list of COVID-19 Positive Case, which is updated daily and reports the numbers of positive cases identified per day, by categories, such as Athlete, Media, Contractor, and Volunteer. By the time of me wrapping this article up, which was 1st August 2021, there were 241 confirmed cases, out of which 124 were contractors who are mostly residents of Japan and do not live in the athlete village.
The risk of the Tokyo Games being a super-spreader event appears to have been mitigated by keeping the public away, but it is definitely not eliminated. While the stats do not tell the sources of infections, by naming confirmed cases’ close contacts, the list does suggest cross-transmissions between the athlete village’s residents and non-residents, probably when they mingled during the courses of the Olympics games.
Would the Chinese government be willing to raise their threshold of tolerance, so that the Winter games can go on? To me, running the Winter Olympics would be such a conumdrum, i.e., totalitarianism vs discretions and transparency, that it may put China at its wits’ end. Despite the growing calls to boycott the games due to alleged human rights issues in Xinjiang, I tend to believe the coronavirus is more likely what could rock China’s boat. What goes around, may/will come around.
As such, while the world’s eyes are now all on Tokyo these two weeks, I cannot help but keep wondering how things would look in Beijing in six months’ time.
I believe the Chinese government has also realised this potential hazard, and hence picked up its pace to vaccinate its citizens and to build up its ‘great immunisation wall’. The problem is, that the jabs that have been going into the arms of the Mainland Chinese are mainly the two domestically developed vaccines, which have received non-stop questioning of their efficacy. Use of the Chinse vaccines may have been defended within the country and overseas, but to me, China’s decision on booster shot is an outright admission, that its homemade lifesavers are subpar compared to their foreign counterparts, no less.
Spectators? We’ll see…
The other divisive and controversial topic about COVID-19 is its origin. As a layman, I am not going to give my two cents’ worth on that. But as ferociously as China may claim the Lab hypothesis a conspiracy theory, the 2003 SARS outbreak was no short of theories either, with fingers pointing mostly at the US, and lab-leak is not improbable.
Over the last few months, China has seen mounting pressure on it over allowing a second on-site investigation. But I think that is no different from ‘asking tiger for its hide’, a Chinese saying like ‘get blood out of a stone’.
So we might never find out how the virus has come about. But does it matter? Well, it would, from a scientific perspective.
But with scientists split over the theory of origin, and neither side possessing convincing information over the other, everyone of the general public can make up their own mind, and they will, regardless of being influenced, or not, by the Chinese narratives or the American ones.
I know there have been surveys conducted over this topic, but I was tempted to start my own, one that hopefully span even across China: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6QZB8CG (Feel free to share!)
It is one simple question: Bat or lab?
