Par Vincent Bordenave
Published
January 11 at 6:00 a.m.,
updated January 11 at 7:58 a.m.
HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP
NARRATIVE – Five years ago, on January 11, 2020, the first patient died of a strange pneumonia that appeared in the city of Wuhan. No one suspects that we are witnessing the start of a pandemic that will paralyze the planet for more than three years.
January 2020. China is preparing the Lunar New Year festivities with great excitement. Millions of people are expected to cross the country to gather and celebrate as the country is hit by a mysterious epidemic of « atypical pneumonia ». The first cases were detected in December in the city of Wuhan, near the Huanan seafood wholesale market, where many live animals are piled up. The alert was launched internationally on December 31, when the Taiwanese Centers for Disease Control (CDC) notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of the discovery of a potentially dangerous disease, whose symptoms resemble those of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003.
On January 11, the Chinese authorities announced a first death. At this time, the hypothesis of human-to-human contamination remains excluded. We had to wait until January 20 for the WHO to recognize that what is still called 2019-nCov (for 2019 new coronavirus), is indeed contagious. In the same vein, Chinese virologist Zhang Yongzhen made the complete genome sequence public, against the advice of the National Health Commission. This act of disobedience is a crucial gesture. Scientists around the world…
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