China has effectively snuffed out Covid-19, thanks to stringent border curbs, mass testing.
Where the pathogen first appeared and how it was transmitted to humans is an elusive mystery, which becomes more difficult with each passing month.
In the year since seafood peddlers began popping up in Wuhan hospitals with strange and debilitating pneumonia, the world has learned a lot about Covid-19, from how it spreads to how it is vaccinated against the infection. Despite these developments, there remains a gap in our understanding of the virus that has killed nearly two million people and ravaged the global economy: We still don't know how it started.
China has effectively eliminated Covid-19, thanks to strict border restrictions, mass testing and a surveillance network that allows infected people to be tracked and their contacts via mobile data. With the conflict over the source of the epidemic turning into an extension of the broader conflict between the two superpowers in the world, China is now trying to review the story of the virus from the start, and nowhere is this more evident than in the original epicenter: Wuhan.
There is no mention of the Huanan seafood market, those first infections, or the public uproar about the government's coverage in the early days of the epidemic, when it concealed the extent of human-to-human transmission and delayed action. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower doctor whose death from Covid-19 sparked the biggest backlash Beijing has seen in years, appears in the lineup of other Wuhan doctors who have contracted the virus, barely noticeable. For many Chinese, that anger has been replaced by a sense of pride, and that their country has overcome a crisis that almost defeated the United States, leaving China stronger and on the right track - according to at least one consulting firm - to become the world's largest economy for five years. Earlier than previously expected
With the virus tightly contained - Wuhan has not recorded any locally transmitted cases since May - there is a growing drive to dispel the notion that China was the ultimate source of the virus, known formally as SARS-CoV-2. A State Department spokesman was adopting theories linking the virus to the US military, and after a series of cases in Chinese ports and cold storage workers, state-backed media claim that the virus could have entered the country via imported frozen food. They also took advantage of research indicating that infections in the United States and Italy preceded those in Wuhan.
While some of these theories may have credibility, the irony is that we may never know how and where the virus appeared. China has ignored calls for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, leading to trade restrictions on Australia after it called for it. It also halted WHO efforts to bring top infectious disease experts into Wuhan this year. This prevented painstaking epidemiological investigation - from examining samples of city sewage, to examining patient samples collected months before the outbreak of the outbreak for early effects of the pathogen and conducting tests in the food market itself - which could provide insight into the chain of events that The virus brought the virus to the bustling capital of Hubei province, and how to prevent it from happening again.
Now, with the WHO team focused on tracing the origins of the virus in hopes of visiting Wuhan in January, and a staff commissioned by the Lancet medical journal also on research, the city may not have much to uncover. Life is largely back to normal for Wuhan's 11 million residents, and the first to experience lockdowns has now closed parts of Europe and North America for a second time.
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