Wuhan virus, DDT and the Lysol papers
It is well established that the city of Wuhan is the ground zero for the Novel Coronavirus, and this city possesses China’s largest library, and more importantly is home to the most sophisticated virology lab in the country. Ostensibly a viral breakout from this very laboratory resulted in the mayhem that shook the worldβs economy and sadly the lives of many millions around the world. A minor accident: a test tube containing bio-hazardous waste had slipped from the hand of a lab technician on the 3rd floor of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (that’s δΈε½η§ε¦ι’ζ¦ζ±η ζ―η η©Άζ in Chinese), he grabbed his notes and sounded the alarm. Doors slammed into lockdown but it was already too late its impossible to hold back humans in moments of real panic – scientists jump out of the lower floor windows spilling across the lawns, masks and gowns flying, the virus begins to creep its way onto the streets moving from host to host, then home to home and soon country to country. Days later, innocent people are falling ill with a deadly infection, the internet is shut down, and the government engages the military to silence the province, again too late. According to scientific research assistant Dr Donald DDT Trump middle D is for Dummkopf, currently being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medical Science, after tweeting the groundbreaking discovery that injecting Lysol into humans could turn the brain into a bubble bath inhospitable to the virus. Nobody else knew what had happened until on January 11th 2020, Dr Yon Zhen Zang released the Coronavirus genetic profile onto a file sharing site from his office in Shanghai and made history – news of the virus spread as fast as the virus itself, Yon was arrested for breach of national security, and became history himself by dying, from coronavirus at the age of 34, truly the first martyr of the pandemic.
with the benefit of hindsight having seen the virus and what it can do I think we can revise the above theory as follows: this virus can be fatal to young people and it is much more severe than the flu in what it can do. The Chinese government did try to control the virus spread by locking down Wuhan, and Hubei province, and military engagement actually helped to limit spread inside that country, and the division of the province into sectors, which were heavily quarantined, resulting in a rapid control of the virus, similar in efficacy to what we have seen in other effectively organised countries like Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Germany. Interestingly Canada and Australia have also controlled the virus spread very effectively – so far without such draconian measures and may effectuate a more complete herd immunisation. The reason China achieved a lower death rate form the virus can be attributed to technical aberration and observer bias. As the top virology lab in China happened to be adjacent to the Wuhan Hospital, a few minutes ride from the market, it was already destined to be the first place to detect coronavirus which had been running rampant in China for many months completely undetected – people dying with the hidden virus were initially diagnosed with community acquired and hospital acquired pneumonia, obviously there was no way to detect the virus at that time. Chinese hospitals are sadly ineffective and it is only the Wuhan General Hospital that has the expertise to detect novel infections such as Covid 19. This is what really happened, and because the virus was detected long after the pandemic really started in China, it was already reaching its natural end – which is why China reported fewer case fatalities due to coronavirus than, say Italy, a country with a better health care service and a population 2% the size of China’s. This is a much less interesting account of what happened so will probably not reach the papers, but at least we should think twice before accusing China of incubating or even creating viral infections, when there are plenty of other viruses from other countries (MERS from Arabia, Ebola from West Africa, Swine flu form Mexico) very often these viruses are named after the place they are discovered rather than where they actually originate, and such is the case of the βWuhan virusβ.
