ONE YEAR AFTER COVID-19
Remarkably, for the longest time, these basic epidemiological questions were very hard to answer and were fraught with political and geopolitical overlays. Original reporting had it that the virus had originated in a so-called “wet market” in Wuhan, China and was related to the consumption of animals particular to the local culture, such as the pangolin. Then the story itself mutated over time, as did the World Health Organization’s original determination on the virus’s transmissibility, first claiming that the virus could live on surfaces weeks after contamination and later pulling that back. However, given that China remains the world’s largest Communist dictatorship and Wuhan is home to one of the regime’s top virology labs, this confusion – or obfuscation – should not really have surprised anyone. In fact, before the outbreak, back in 2018, then- President Donald Trump’s administration officials expressed grave concerns over what was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (“WIV”), concerns that Secretary Mike Pompeo made explicit just five days before he left his position, when he stated: “Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.” Whether or not COVID-19 was a man-made, deliberately released, and genetically modified version of an existing coronavirus like SARS, or spread as the result of an accident which occurred during otherwise altruistically
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus – or COVID-19 – outbreak to have reached pandemic levels, meaning the virus had spread from the epidemic in Wuhan, China to numerous other nations and infected many people outside of the original area. In the intervening year, more than 125 million humans have been infected, 2.7 million have died with COVID-19, and 101 million have contracted and recovered from this novel coronavirus, which is very similar to the 2003 SARS virus that also originated in China. As many nations and U.S. states are still in lockdown, and we witness economic-recovery packages signed into law that beggar in size and scope from anything seen before, this anniversary justifies a sober examination of what has happened over the last year. As many nations and U.S. states are still in lockdown, and we witness economic-recovery packages signed into law that beggar in size and scope from anything seen before, this anniversary justifies a sober examination of what has happened over the last year. First things first: What is COVID, where did it come from, and how did it spread?
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April 2021
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