Wuhan: How the Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control; Wuhan: A Documentary Novel – reviews | History books

Cif you will, think back to the beginning of the pandemic, before the World Health Organization coined the term Covid-19. At the time, it was the “Wuhan virus”, a mysterious pathogen from a city that few people are outside of China visited

On January 12, 2020, China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the virus’ genome on an international database, allowing scientists around the world to see that it is a coronavirus closely related to Sars – the pathogen that caused a mini-pandemic in 2002-2004.

On January 20, Dr Zhong Nanshan – well known in China as the first person to speak out about the threat posed by SARS in 2003 – appeared on China Central Television to announce the news that the Wuhan virus – or Sars-CoV-2 if it was now officially known – was “definitely transmissible from person to person”.

Three days later, China’s President Xi Jinping ordered officials in Wuhan to lock down the city, placing 11 million under an unprecedented three-month quarantine. The problem was that since December 27, 2019, clinicians had been warning of a new Sars-like disease, and by the end of January, cases had already appeared in Thailand, Japan and Korea. The Wuhan virus has gone global.

What is responsible for China’s failure to prevent the pandemic? After all, unlike Sars, which was initially mistaken for bird flu, Sars-CoV-2 was quickly identified by several laboratories in China. And after SARS, China overhauled its national disease reporting system to ensure it wouldn’t be caught flat-footed a second time. Wuhan also boasted some of the best hospitals in China and a world-class virology institute.

As Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and an expert on Chinese bureaucracy, puts it in his new book, Wuhan: How the Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiral Out Control, China started with a “remarkably strong hand” but quickly squandered its “authoritarian advantage.” Why? Was it medical myopia – a refusal to recognize the monster at its door – bureaucratic incompetence, or something more sinister?

Yang has little time for claims that the virus was the product of a “lab leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), devoting just one paragraph to the theory. Instead, he focuses on the bureaucratic obfuscation and missteps that allowed the outbreak to spiral out of control.

Frontline doctors, he explains, were initially afraid to report their suspicions to Beijing in case they were accused of scaremongering. Municipal-level officials were similarly reluctant to tarnish Wuhan’s reputation as a “healthy city,” which gave the go-ahead for a mass gathering of provincial Communist party officials on January 15. As a result, it wasn’t until New Year’s Eve that the CDC’s director, George Gao, sent a specialist emergency response team to Wuhan, after learning of the outbreak via social media.

The second mistake came when the National Health Commission team decided to shut down the Huanan market in Wuhan, even though clinicians were already seeing patients with no connection to the market in early January. The third came when the Wuhan Health Commission issued guidelines on how to diagnose the disease, which stated that in addition to the usual clinical symptoms, patients must have had a link to the market or be close to the market. This meant that cases with no apparent connection to the market were ignored, lulling the authorities into a false sense of complacency as the virus stealthily spread under the radar.

The result was that rather than drawing on its post-Sars warning systems and its considerable epidemiological expertise, China prioritized dominance and control over transparency, censoring social media posts about the spread of contagion, disciplining medical whistleblowers, and using its reserves of lost trust.

Citing a study that showed that if Wuhan had closed five days earlier, Covid-19 cases in China would have been two-thirds lower, Yang describes the four-week period from December 31 to the closure of Wuhan on January 23 as “among the most important weeks in the history of pandemics”.

He concludes his book by arguing that if, rather than using its powers to silence whistle-blowers and issue positive propaganda messages, Beijing had been open and honest with the citizens of Wuhan, people’s memories of Sars and fear of infection could have called for the voluntary adoption of social distancing measures, in order to limit or avoid catastrophe.

I’m not so sure. By dating back mutations in the virus, scientists estimate that it most likely infected someone as early as November or late October 2019. In other words, long before patients started developing unusual pneumonias, the virus had likely already escaped Wuhan and would become a global problem.

Aimed primarily at an academic audience, Yang’s book is sometimes difficult – I could have done without the bold subheadings, such as “The Stability Maintenance Regime”, that pepper each chapter. However, as a forensic account of the initial response to the outbreak and China’s dysfunctional bureaucracy, I doubt it will be improved.

For a more compelling, if episodic, take on those early, fear-filled weeks of the pandemic, readers should turn to Liao Yiwu’s Wuhan. A Chinese dissident best known for his poems about the Tiananmen Square massacreLiao is an outspoken critic of the Chinese regime.

From exile in Italy, he wrote an extraordinary “documentary novel” that uses official Chinese websites plus social media posts and blogs by citizen reporters to create a ground-level view of the crisis that blends fact and fiction. The main character is “Kcriss”, a former Chinese state TV host who travels to Wuhan to shed light on the rumors and ends up taking a job at a funeral home.

It doesn’t take Kcriss long to realize that Wuhan’s crematoria are working overtime and that the official death toll is a lie. But nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of the party and its message: “One Belt, One Road, don’t look back.”

Unlike Yang, Liao does not dodge the questions surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, his account, which relies heavily on secondary sources, is inconclusive and he is unable to say whether “an evil” was committed there. However, he and Yang agree on the question of whether Wuhan could and should have been closed earlier. “Like a high-speed train rushing to the edge of a deep abyss … the city is closed too late.”

According to Yang, this failure was due to a mixture of cognitive bias – the expectation that the market outbreak would be self-limiting – and China’s multi-layered party-state hierarchy, which followed its own institutional political logic, rather than that of the virus.

The tragedy is that Chinese authorities seem to have learned little from their mistakes. Last month was Shanghai-based virologist Zhang Yongzhen kicked out of his lab at short noticeapparently as a punishment for sharing the genome of the coronavirus without permission.

On January 5, 2020, Zhang was one of the first to follow up on the virus and concluded that it had spread from person to person, and urged the authorities to take action. When they were premature, he decided to bypass official channels and publish the genome on virological.org, where it was accessible to scientists all over the world. A day later, the CDC followed suit.

In response to his expulsion, Zhang camped outside his laboratory in protest. “I will not leave, I will not stop, I pursue science and the truth!” he announced in a since-deleted Weibo post. Last week he and his team were allowed to return to the laboratory for the time being. Unfortunately, bureaucrats in China have long memories and the truth is determined by the party, not scientists.

Mark Honigsbaum is a lecturer at the City University of London and the author of The pandemic century

• Wuhan: How the Covid-19 outbreak in China got out of control by Dali L Yang is published by Oxford University Press (£26.99). Around the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

• Wuhan: A documentary Book by Liao Yiwu is published by Polity (£25). Around the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply