COVID-19: A Lesson in Politics and Optics
Devon Jiang
The COVID-19 Pandemic, as of publication, has taken the lives of more than 2.5 million around the Globe. Numbers, throughout this virus, have been less captivating. That said, imagine everyone in Kansas died. Maybe that’s not the right analogy, but put it this way: if all deaths by COVID happened in Kansas, Al Gore would have served as the 43rd President, and An Inconvenient Truth would have been a hit success. That is simply the inconvenient truth we have to succumb to.
As we approach the first anniversary of COVID lockdowns in the United States, I want to reflect on the past, where COVID-19 was called a novel coronavirus and not the Kung Flu. Our health leaders had an opportunity not to let SARS repeat on the World stage. The result, though, was a pandemic hundreds of times worse than SARS.
To conclude who had let COVID-19 proliferate, we have to rewind not to the first COVID-19 case but the first SARS case in 2002. SARS supposedly came from a bat transmitted to a cat, who passed on to humans at a market.
Doctors, who started seeing the first cases in the Guangzhou metropolitan area, relayed the information they found about SARS to the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP had to suppress the virus before it could replicate en masse. At the same time, the party believed that sharing all of the knowledge they gathered would be politically detrimental. Thus, the Chinese Government chose to act as if everything was normal.
The World reacted to the epidemic with confusion. SARS seemed infectious, yet the Chinese Government portrayed a different story. The actual severity of the epidemic laid undercover until a doctor exposed the undercounting by the Government. The CCP had finally relented, reporting closer to real numbers. Unfortunately, though, the virus had already arrived in other countries, resulting in 774 deaths around the World.
The aftermath of the SARS epidemic involved protests and attacks from the Chinese to the CCP. The outbreak showed a fundamental issue with the structure of the authoritarian Government. Leaders of China are incentivized to keep everything as normal as possible. When everything seems normal, their constituents are happy. When an outbreak hits, though, the virus attacks that notion of keeping everything regular.
To contain an outbreak, one has to reduce the transmission of the virus, which involves lockdowns. Lockdowns are not under the definition of normal. Because of that fact, the CCP chose to suppress the numbers and let their days carry on while the virus carries on to others.
The World Health Organization and others could have had a moment to stop the epidemic from killing hundreds of lives, but the delay of China’s reporting meant the WHO had no idea how transmissible the virus was and how to treat it. After the SARS epidemic, China stepped up and declared that they would, in future outbreaks, transmit a high level of transparency about a virus to the World.
The headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, who was under fire for inaction in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
China wanted to make sure its words translated to actions. They created a renewed Center for Disease Control and Protection. Using hundreds of expert medical experts, they started monitoring China to provide confidence in detecting diseases. Then, COVID came.
COVID-19, in comparison to SARS, are similar. The viruses carry nearly the same name: SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1. The significant difference is that the SARS outbreak virus is more deadly, while COVID-19 spreads more easily.
China was to blame for the SARS epidemic. They are certainly one of the groups to blame in the COVID-19 pandemic. The first known case of COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Seafood Market, which is similar to the start of SARS. Cases started spreading in Wuhan, with around a dozen patients experiencing sickness. A Wuhan hospital sent a sample of an infected patient to a lab for examinations.
The lab found a short genome sequence, which related to SARS. That test was the beginning of a chain of events. The lab technicians retested, saying that they were 100% sure. Soon after, the CCP and the Chinese CDC knew about the case. The Chinese Government could have shared the sequence with the international community, but China refused to release the data.
WeChat groups of doctors took notice of the information, spreading it between messages. Li Wenliang was one of the individuals who would later be known as the “whistleblower” who helped reveal the severity of COVID-19.
When COVID-19 started spreading in Wuhan, the city’s Government and the Chinese Government told the medical workers to stop public reporting of COVID. Many workers did not listen and leaked information to the International community.
All of these events occurred in late December. Before New Years’, many virologists were freaking out, but the public still had little to no idea due to China’s censorship.
The World wanted to know what was occurring in China, but that only made Chinese officials more complicit in hiding data to not receive the blame.
In Geneva, Switzerland, the World Health Organization debated on how to respond to China’s incompetence. The health laws stated that if a country confirmed a new coronavirus, they would have to report that to the WHO within a day. China went against that sentiment.
Doctors in China wanted to give WHO and others information about COVID-19 to the World community so that diagnostics could start. China, though, refused. WHO had a decision to make: wait for the data to arrive or start pressing against China in public. Ultimately, they were complicit in letting China get away with violating their rules.
Just like SARS, a doctor had to leak the information over to the public. In the case of COVID-19, Yong-Zhen Zhang was one of the doctors who gave the genetic sequence of COVID-19 to the public. China’s CDC relented, like SARS, and gave the genetic material.
The story of COVID-19 emulated and exasperated the response to the SARS outbreak in 2002. The definition of deja vu is a feeling that one is experiencing something they have witnessed before. SARS and COVID-19 fit the description of deja vu. Even though China created a revitalized CDC to pit itself against another virus, China repeated the blunders of mitigating an outbreak.
China’s CDC had the infrastructure necessary to do everything it could against COVID-19. That said, politics took over science, with the CCP limiting transparency. China’s CDC and COVID-19 are like a new but closed highway. Having a road is fantastic, but the route is useless if no one drives on it. China’s CDC infrastructure is world-class, but the tools are useless if China’s Government prevents them from being used.
COVID-19 showed that China did not make enough advancements in pandemic responses, the changes they made were not in the right places, and WHO was too complicit in China’s COVID response.
The first step China did not partake was regulating its markets. These areas attract many tourists and local farmers, but China never took action on markets like the Wuhan Seafood Market when they were under-maintained and a breeding ground for pathogens. The fact that there are many dead and live animals that aren’t sanitized congregating in one area means that a virus is more likely to develop.
Transparency is, once again, the critical factor in mitigating another disaster response to an outbreak. In 2002, China failed to provide the World enough information to act on time. The same event occurred in 2019, with the International community clueless on testing the virus and its transmissibility. Even though giving information about a potentially dangerous virus goes against the core values of the Chinese Communist Party, which is to make everything expected for the public, transparency is the right move. A virus can only go away if people deviate from their norms, like confining in their buildings. Even though China says that they need to be sure that the information they have is accurate, inaction is substantially harmful than providing a few incorrect facts.
The World Health Organization also has a role in the botched COVID-19 response. Even though they are part of the United Nations, whose number one goal is diplomacy, human safety is always more important than diplomacy.
There are many other people and countries to blame for the prolonged lockdowns, but if we are talking about those who messed up the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, these are the key players.
The fact that we have to relearn our lesson once again shows how we let optics and “politics” control our response rather than our intuition and past precedent. In most cases, one country trying to suppress a virus by itself never produce favorable outcomes. Everyone has something to contribute to the medical community to research the characteristics of a pathogen like SARS-CoV-2, so in the future, use them.
Based on past precedent, focusing on optics before using facts and past precedent never works. The United States learned this twice from COVID-19 and the Southern Border Wall. We must use facts and past precedent to solve a problem. If we do that, then the good optics will ensue. That idea is simply logic: you are complimented for implementing solutions, you don’t receive compliments by suppressing the issue.