Other great stories tonight: Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan moving away from the royal family; coverage of the plane crash in Iran; and the story about Iran’s weapons capacity.
The beginning of this pandemic was a misinformation fiasco, a perfect example of the fog of war that involves outbreaks of new pathogens. It was a mix of panicked confusion at Wuhan hospitals, lies from local health officials and wrong guesses from health agencies, virus experts and journalists, including me.
The January 8 story was the second The Times published about the virus. The first, on January 6, described China battling a mysterious pneumonia that, according to local health officials, had hospitalized a few dozen people with connections to a local seafood and meat market. It did not kill anyone and it does not appear to have spread from person to person, Wuhan health officials said. Here in the United States, this generated many speculations: that it was the return of SARS in a more lenient way; that they were contaminated vapors, that they were killing American teenagers, that perhaps the African swine fever epidemic in China had hit humans. In addition, last year’s flu season was getting ugly, and the flu causes a lot of pneumonia.
The news on January 8 was that Chinese state media said that unidentified local scientists concluded that the mysterious pneumonia was caused by a previously unknown coronavirus. I filled in some background paragraphs for Sui-Lee, including the information that there were no deaths and no person-to-person transmission. She asked why I thought that. I sent her the last American CDC travel alert for China, issued on January 6, and it was just a level 1 “usual practice precautions”. He said there were 59 cases with no deaths and “no reports of spread from person to person or to health professionals”.
In retrospect, neither Sui-Lee, nor myself, nor the CDC nor the World Health Organization knew that, on December 31, the politically ambitious mayor of Wuhan had ordered a cover-up. He closed and washed the market, and eight doctors who were trying to raise the alarm were arrested. He even cheated Beijing. Therefore, all information from that time is risky. Even now, different schedules from that period (examples here, here and here) disagree about the basic facts.
The seriousness of the situation was not confirmed until January 20, when Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a pulmonologist sometimes called “China’s Fauci,” completed his investigation and said on state TV that Wuhan had a disaster on his hands; the city was closed on 23 January.
Even during the severe blockade in Hubei province, doctors were unsure of the extent of the problem. As of mid-February, their PCR test system was still so overloaded that they changed their case definition to include diagnostics by computed tomography; his case count increased tenfold overnight. Lest we scoff: the same thing happened in New York in March and is, to some extent, happening in the United States so far: when you can’t process PCR tests fast enough, you don’t know the actual count of your cases. You are flying blind. – Donald G. McNeil Jr., science and health reporter