Did China lie about COVID-19? – Is China responsible for the botched response in the West? – Part 3

[Note: A shorter, revised and on a few issues more up to date version of this piece has been published by Quillette as a four-part essay. The version on Quillette is more polished and a bit less polemical, but this one has more technical details on some issues, so which version you should read depends on what you’re looking for.]

What about the claim that it’s China’s fault if the outbreak in Wuhan led to a pandemic that killed thousands of people and will result in trillions of dollar worth of economic damage, because if the Chinese government hadn’t suppressed information about human-to-human transmission and acted sooner to contain the outbreak, this wouldn’t have happened? I think it’s important to carefully distinguish several questions here, which almost nobody does. One question is whether China could have acted sooner to contain the outbreak in Wuhan and prevent the virus from spreading to the rest of the world. Another question is whether, even if Chinese government could have acted sooner and prevented the virus from spreading to the rest of the world, it’s reasonable to blame it for having failed to do so. Finally, one last question is whether, even assuming that China can reasonably have been expected to act sooner and that it would have prevented the pandemic, Western governments can legitimately blame the disaster that unfolded in their country on China and, in particular, whether their botched response to the pandemic can plausibly be attributed to China’s alleged lies. Many people talk as if those questions were the same, but as we shall see, they are not and your answer to one doesn’t necessarily determine your answer to the others. So let’s discuss each of them in turn.

Let’s start with the question of whether China could have acted sooner to contain the outbreak in Wuhan and whether it would have prevented the pandemic. We have seen that, on January 14, the National Health Commission started to plan for the virus to spread to the rest of the country. I have argued that, despite what many people claim, the Chinese health authorities probably had not reached the conclusion that human-to-human transmission was likely occurring until January 14, perhaps a few days earlier but not many. I have also argued that, given the constraints they faced, they could hardly have figured it out faster. Indeed, as we have seen, the American CDC did not figure out that human-to-human transmission was occurring any faster at the beginning of the swine influenza pandemic in 2009. I will discuss the question of whether there is a reasonable expectation that China should have acted then shortly. But for the moment, I will just note that, in principle, nothing would have prevented the Chinese government from putting Wuhan on lockdown in mid-January instead of waiting until January 23. So what difference would it have made? Well, the truth is that we don’t know, no matter what anyone says.

A lot of people cite a study which used simulations to find that, had the Chinese government implemented the various non-pharmaceutical interventions it did after January 23 a week earlier, the number of infections in China as of February 29 would have been reduced by 66%, but there is no good reason to take this estimate very seriously. It’s not just or even mainly that there was a lot of variability in the simulations, the interquartile range of the estimate was 50%-82%, but also that it’s based on a pretty crude model, so the main source of error is probably misspecification of the model rather than variability of the simulations. (Incidentally, this study is often cited to criticize the Chinese government for not acting quickly enough by the same people who claim the Chinese data are faked, but it’s based on those very data, which interestingly doesn’t seem to bother them.) Saying that doesn’t make me “anti-science”, as I know some people will claim, it’s just that I understand how difficult estimating this kind of counterfactuals is and they don’t. That being said, whatever the precise number is, I have no problem believing that putting Wuhan on lockdown a week earlier could have significantly reduced the number of infections, just because it increases exponentially in the early phase of the epidemic. I’m just saying that we have no idea by how much exactly. Could it have prevented a pandemic? Frankly, given how Western governments botched their response (more on this shortly), I’m very skeptical it would have. If I had to bet, I’d say a pandemic would still have happened, only a few weeks later. But I guess it’s possible and the truth is that we’ll never know.

So the Chinese government could in theory have acted earlier and, had it done so, it might have prevented a pandemic, although I doubt it. But is there a reasonable expectation that China should have acted earlier than it did? People seem to think the answer to that question is obvious. Since the government had reached the conclusion that human-to-human transmission was probably occurring by mid-January, it should have acted then, end of story. However, as I hope my discussion of how the Chinese health authorities came to believe that human-to-human transmission was occurring showed, this is not something that happens all of a sudden. There isn’t a point in time such that, before that point, they didn’t know that human-to-human transmission was possible, but after that point they did. It was a very gradual process during which people’s assessment of the probability that human-to-human transmission is occurring slowly changes as more evidence comes in. This isn’t specific to the Chinese health authorities either, it was exactly the same thing for the American CDC with the swine influenza pandemic in 2009, as the transcripts of the press briefings I discussed previously show. The only difference is that, in the case of the American CDC, you could see the view of officials change in real time, because unlike the Chinese health authorities they were open about it.

As the confidential documents obtained by the Associated Press suggest, even when they started making preparation for the virus spreading from Wuhan to the rest of the country, the Chinese health authorities still weren’t entirely sure that sustained human-to-human transmission was occurring. It’s only in the days that followed the secret teleconference held on January 14, especially after the team of experts led by Zhong Nanshan visited Wuhan, that their doubts on the matter were gradually lifted. Once you keep in mind that it was a gradual process, the answer to the question above is not so obvious anymore. In fact, it’s not just that I think it’s not obvious that Chinese officials are blameworthy for not acting sooner, it’s that I think this view is crazy. People would see that if they tried to put themselves in the shoes of Chinese officials for a second. I know they don’t want to, because they’re evil and all that, but this is not a good reason. To be clear, I’m not saying that, if someone does something or fails to do something and, after putting yourself in their shoes, you conclude that you would have done the same thing in their position, they are necessary blameless. Had I been German during WW2, I might have participated in the Holocaust, but it doesn’t mean that the people who participated in the Holocaust did nothing wrong. However, if you’re trying to decide whether someone is blameworthy for something they did or didn’t do, this is surely part of what you have to consider.

As I explain below, the measures China took to contain the outbreak after January 23 were unprecedented, nobody had ever done anything like that before and nobody has gone that far since. They totally crippled China’s economy and, crucially, Chinese officials could not have ignored they would have that effect. Moreover, before January 20, only 3 people had died and China had no idea what the fatality rate was. In fact, even more than 4 months later, we still don’t know, yet people talk as if China could have known at the time just how bad this virus was. (I know that some people will reply that China is lying and that far more people had already died, but the official number of deaths at this point is perfectly consistent with what we know based on independently verifiable evidence, so this is nonsense.) So basically people are blaming Chinese officials for not immediately making decisions that would cripple their economy, even though they didn’t know how infectious and deadly SARS-CoV-2 was. (Not to mention that, as I will explain shortly, it took far longer for Western governments to make decisions that came way short of what the Chinese did to contain the outbreak, despite knowing far more about what they were dealing with.) This position makes absolutely no sense and, again, people would see that if they were not so blinded by their hostility toward the Chinese Communist Party. Once you accept that, it’s also nonsensical to blame China for not stopping international air traffic from Wuhan until January 23, as many people do. How could they have justified that without also stopping domestic travel to and from Wuhan, which as I just noted they were understandably still hesitating on whether it was the right course of action? People really need to think more carefully about this before they give in to hysteria.

Finally, let’s turn to the last question, namely whether the botched response of most Western governments can be ascribed to China, in particular because by withholding information the Chinese government prevented them from making the right decisions at the right time. For instance, during a press conference on April 18 (at 36:07 in the video), after insinuating in no uncertain terms that China’s official figures about the number of deaths caused by the outbreak were fake, Birx went on to suggest that China had withheld information from the U.S. that would have allowed the authorities over there to know what they were dealing with and that it’s only thanks to the information that was passed on to them by European countries that lives had been saved in the U.S. I mention Birx since she is a public figure who played a key role during the pandemic, but this claim is ubiquitous. I literally can’t open Twitter without seeing people making it within 5 minutes. (It’s not just random people on the Internet or people in Trump’s administration either. For instance, in a recent ad released by Joe Biden’s campaign, Trump is accused of having botched his response to the pandemic because he believed what China was telling him. This narrative is clearly going to play a big role on both sides in the upcoming presidential election.) Now, I’m going to do my best to remain civil here, but I still have to say that no intelligent person should make that claim without feeling a deep sense of shame, because it’s absolutely preposterous and it’s incredible that so many people take it seriously.

Interestingly, when they make that claim, people rarely say what exactly China should have told them but didn’t that would have allowed the rest of the world to respond to the pandemic more effectively. Of course, it’s not surprising, because Western countries knew everything they needed to know in order to take this virus seriously by the end of January and yet most of them didn’t. In fact, not only did most of them not take it seriously, but many public health officials and experts in the West minimized the threat and continued to do so long after bodies started to pile up in China. Again, even before things started to get really bad in China, people in the rest of the world already had more than enough information to take the threat very seriously. As we have seen, by January 20, everybody knew that human-to-human transmission was possible. By January 24, most of Hubei, a province of 58 million, was under strict quarantine. In the days that followed, the Chinese government took increasingly drastic measures to contain the epidemic, not only in Hubei but also in the rest of the country. Now, the Chinese government is not exactly known for being sentimental, so the fact that it resorted to such extreme measures should have tipped off any government that wasn’t completely incompetent that something very serious was happening even if China had not been sharing information with the rest of the world at the time, which it did.

This conclusion should also have been clear from the studies that were published around that time. The Lancet study published on January 24 I already mentioned showed that, among the first 41 patients, 15% had already died. Another study published in The Lancet on January 30 showed that, among 99 patients admitted at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, 11% had died by January 25. Of course, those are based on hospitalized cases, so there was good reasons to suspect they were overestimating the case fatality rate by a lot, but it was more than enough to take the virus seriously and it’s not as if the Chinese could have provided better estimates of the fatality rate so early. (Another study published on February 12 in the Annals of Translational Medicine found that, among the laboratory-confirmed cases between January 10 and February 3, the fatality rate was 0.15% in mainland China excluding Hubei, 1.41% in Hubei excluding Wuhan and 5.25% in Wuhan.) The New England Journal of Medicine study I also mentioned previously, published on January 29, concluded that SARS-CoV-2 had a basic reproduction number of 2.2, which suggested that the virus was spreading very quickly.

On January 26, China’s health minister had declared that asymptomatic transmission was possible during a press briefing, but several Western public officials said they were very skeptical. For instance, on January 27, after the Chinese Health Commission said it believed people were infectious during the incubation period, the Chief Medical Officer for the government in Australia declared that experts didn’t believe it was likely because this doesn’t occur with SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV. In the US, Fauci expressed a similar skepticism on NPR that day, but to be fair he seemed more open to the possibility. They don’t seem to have taken that possibility seriously until a few days later, when German doctors published a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine where they claimed to have identified a case of asymptomatic transmission. (Ironically, this claim was found to be unfounded a few days later, when it turned out the person they believed to have been asymptomatic when she infected other people had in fact symptoms at the time.) Finally, by January 31, Chinese researchers had already uploaded 41 genomes of the virus on GISAID, a public database used by researchers all over the world. In short, the notion that people in the rest of the world didn’t have enough information to prepare for the pandemic because China didn’t tell them what it knew is a complete fiction, it bears no connection to reality.

One claim that I hear particularly often is that, if only China had not suppressed information about human-to-human transmission, it would have changed everything. Unlike most of the claims that people make when they argue that China’s dishonesty is responsible for the botched response to the pandemic in the West, this actually has some basis in fact, since it’s true that Chinese officials were sometimes misleading about human-to-human transmission, but it’s still ridiculous. First, as we have seen, although it’s true that, for about a week (perhaps 10 days if you really want to stretch it), the Chinese health authorities made several misleading statements about human-to-human transmission, which didn’t reflect what they were actually saying behind closed doors. But as I have also argued, it was a far cry from what most people have in mind when they say that China lied about human-to-human transmission. The evidence suggests that, as late as mid-January, Chinese public health officials were still not sure that sustained human-to-human transmission was occurring, although from that point on they became increasingly convinced that it did and still waited until January 20 to publicly say that.

But more importantly, it’s not even remotely plausible that, had the Chinese been open about how their view on human-to-human transmission was gradually changing at the time, Western governments would have dealt with the pandemic better. The U.S. started screening people traveling from Wuhan at 3 airports on January 17 and, after China publicly said that sustained human-to-human transmission was occurring on January 20, screening was extended to 2 other airports on January 21 but still only for passengers coming from Wuhan. On January 27, more than a week after the Chinese public health authorities declared that human-to-human transmission was occurring, the CDC announced that passengers from China would be screened for symptoms at 20 airports and advised against traveling to China. At this point, China had already confirmed almost 2,800 cases, including more than 1,000 outside Hubei. Cases had been confirmed in every province except Tibet. Moreover, as we have seen, the Chinese authorities had just declared that asymptomatic transmission was possible. However, the U.S. waited until January 31 to announce a ban on travel from China, but this decision wasn’t effective until February 2 and did not apply to citizens and permanent residents. (Yet many public health experts criticized this decision at the time, on the ground that “viruses don’t care about borders” or some such nonsense, including some who testified before Congress on February 5.) In a piece it published on April 4, the New York Times estimated that 40,000 people traveled from China after the ban went into effect.

Yet the United States, although it waited more than 10 days after Chinese officials said that human-to-human transmission was occurring to partially ban travel from China, was actually one of the first developed countries to do so. The European Union, in particular, did not decide to close the borders of the Schengen area until March 17. Some member states, such as Italy, had already imposed restrictions on travel from China by then (Italy actually did before the U.S., which didn’t prevent it from being very badly hit), but many of them, such as France, never took any steps to restrict travel from China. This is also true of several other developed countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, which refused to restrict travel from China and used some of the most ridiculous arguments I have ever heard in my life to justify this decision. Thus, even if we assume that, had China been more transparent about human-to-human transmission, the U.S. would have imposed a partial ban on travel from China 10 days earlier (which I consider a heroic assumption), it most likely wouldn’t have made any difference in the end, since the U.S. didn’t partially ban travel from Europe, excluding the U.K. and Ireland, until March 14. In fact, genetic evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 was mostly brought to New York, the most badly affected state in the U.S., by people who came from Europe.

In short, the claim that Western countries would not have botched their response if China had not lied is not just false, it’s obviously false. This narrative is a transparent attempt by Western governments to deflect blame on China so people won’t hold them accountable for their own incompetence. Again, if people were not so blinded by their hostility toward China and therefore easily manipulated by governments looking for a scapegoat, they would see that. The truth is that, by January 20, they knew everything the Chinese government has been accused of having suppressed earlier (but mostly didn’t), yet most of them didn’t prepare even after it became clear that Beijing was taking the outbreak extremely seriously. (This piece about the response, or lack thereof, in Europe is particularly instructive, but one could say very similar things about the response in the U.S. and several other countries.) In fact, many countries were able to deal with the crisis much better, not only in East Asia but also in Australia, New Zealand and Eastern Europe, despite the fact that, in many cases, they were more connected to China in general and Wuhan in particular.

The evidence is overwhelming that, unlike in some countries where officials took the threat seriously right away and prepared accordingly, most Western leaders and many public health officials didn’t care much about it until it started killing people under their jurisdiction. For instance, as late as March 7 (after more than 3,000 people had died in China and as bodies were already starting to pile up in Italy), Macron went to the theater with his wife in order to encourage people to continue to go out despite the pandemic. You can find countless other similarly clueless statements during that period, long after we knew that human-to-human transmission was possible, by leaders and public health officials in other countries that botched their response to the pandemic. But we’re supposed to believe that, if Chinese officials had told them that human-to-human transmission was possible 10 days earlier (which again they almost certainly wouldn’t have done even if they had been completely transparent), things would have been totally different? If you ask me, people who make that argument should be embarrassed.

As I said before, I’m very skeptical that, had China put Wuhan in quarantine a week earlier, it would actually have prevented a pandemic, but I guess it’s possible and, in any case, we’ll never know. However, if this had happened, it would have been because less infected people would have gotten out of Wuhan and been able, directly or indirectly, to spread the virus in the rest of the world, not because Western governments would have used the extra time to prepare better. Moreover, I have argued that, even if China had been completely transparent about human-to-human transmission, we couldn’t reasonably have expected them to make such a momentous decision in mid-January. The fact of the matter is that, once they realized that sustained human-to-human transmission was occurring, Chinese officials acted far more quickly and decisively than any Western government and it’s not even close, despite not having the benefit of having observed in another country how dangerous this virus could be. They made the decision to do something that had never been tried in history on such a scale before in just a few days and they did so despite knowing far less about the virus than what people in the West did when they decided to do nothing for weeks. In fact, not only did Western governments do nothing for weeks despite knowing more and having more time to prepare than China, but many Western public health experts minimized the threat for weeks and some even criticized the measures taken by China to suppress the epidemic at the time. Now the same newspapers who repeated their nonsense are explaining to us that China should have taken those measures sooner.

Some people claim that, since the virus apparently started circulating in Wuhan in November and China didn’t put the city in quarantine until January 23 (which is about the amount of time that elapsed in most Western countries between the first case and when they went on lockdown), China didn’t really act more quickly, but this comparison is silly. Back in November, when the virus presumably started circulating in Wuhan, neither the Chinese government nor anyone else had any clue it was even out there. The Chinese authorities didn’t realize there was a viral cluster of pneumonia in Wuhan until late December, didn’t formally identify SARS-CoV-2 as the cause until early January and didn’t reach the conclusion sustained human-to-human transmission was possible until mid-January. When they made the decision to Wuhan and soon the rest of Hubei in quarantine, they had no way to know how dangerous the virus actually was. In Western countries, on the other hand, all of that was known when the first cases were diagnosed or soon after, yet most of them didn’t do anything for almost 2 months. The notion that China didn’t act more quickly and more decisively than Western countries is not even remotely plausible.

Thus, even if I were wrong that we can’t reasonably blame China for not having put Wuhan in quarantine earlier (which I’m not), both Western governments and media would definitely not be in a position to blame it. Indeed, even if someone is blameworthy, it doesn’t mean that anyone can blame him. For instance, if I accidentally killed someone because I was driving under the influence, I would definitely be blameworthy, but a serial killer would hardly be in a position to blame me. Yet that is exactly what people like Trump are doing and, even if they were not making a lot of totally unsubstantiated claims in the process (which they are), it would still be outrageous. It’s not just that most Western governments didn’t act quickly and decisively enough to prevent a disaster, it’s also that many of them lied. In fact, if you ask me, most of them lied at least as much as the Chinese government and were hardly more transparent. I certainly think it’s true of the French government and it’s also true of the U.S. government. It’s amazing to me that, instead of making accusations against China that in fact are mostly false, people don’t focus more on the lies of their own government.

Again, China’s response was not perfect and some things went wrong, but this is always the case everywhere and I don’t think it’s plausible that it would have made a huge difference if the Chinese had done everything we could reasonably have expected of them. But even if you think the human and economic consequences of the pandemic would not have been as bad in the West, they definitely wouldn’t have been as bad if Western governments had used the time they had to prepare for the pandemic and the media had forced them to do so instead of playing down the threat, yet everybody focuses on the relatively minor shortcomings of the Chinese and ignore the far worse mistakes that Western governments and news organizations made. I can understand why the media and public officials would do that, since China is a convenient scapegoat for them, but the citizens of Western countries should obviously not fall for that.

Given how they botched their response to the pandemic despite being in a much better position than China to prepare for it, there can be no doubt that, had it started somewhere in the West instead of China, Western governments would not have done better and in fact would have done much worse, even if the reasons for their shortcomings would have been different than for China. So it seems that, to the extent that China is blameworthy but the West isn’t, there is a lot of moral luck involved, i. e. China is more blameworthy than the West only because the outbreak happened to start over there. We can tell the Chinese “the authoritarian nature of your regime has prevented you from dealing with the outbreak better”, but I don’t see why they couldn’t reply “your own institutional failures would not have allowed you to do any better and in fact you clearly would have done a lot worse”. Philosophers disagree about whether moral luck is really a thing. For instance, if someone takes his car while under the influence and kills a child, is he really more blameworthy than someone who did the same thing but didn’t kill anyone because he was luckier? It’s a complicated question and I’m not going to settle it here, but I just want to note that, in this case, the West is more like someone who drinks and drives every day of the year, but thinks he is morally superior to a guy who killed someone after driving under the influence of the first time in his life. To be clear, I’m not trying to draw a moral equivalency between the Chinese regime and Western liberal democracies, let alone saying that China is morally superior. I’m just saying that, if you want to criticize the Chinese regime, then this is not what you should be talking about. It’s not as if there weren’t plenty of much better examples of the Chinese government’s malfeasance.

Of course, even if I’m right that it would have been much worse if the pandemic had started in the West, this is at least partly irrelevant if the reason why it started in China rather than elsewhere has to do with incompetence on the part of the Chinese government. This is basically what many people are saying when they accuse the Chinese government of being responsible because they didn’t close wet markets, even after the outbreak of SARS in 2002/2004, which is thought by many to have originated in bats and passed to humans from civets that were sold on such this kind of markets in Guangdong, although there is still much we don’t know about what happened exactly. If you define wet markets as places where people sell fresh produce in the open-air, as opposed to dry markets that sell non-perishable goods such as grain and household products, they are not really the problem. The problem is when they sell wild animals, which are often kept together alive. This make it easier for viruses to jump from species to species, increasing the probability they will undergo genetic changes that will allow them to infect humans, in close proximity to whom the animals are kept in such markets. There are lots of silly arguments because people talk as if there was a well-established terminology, so they argue that people are wrong to blame “wet markets”, but a look at the literature on the topic shows that the terminology is all over the place. In response to the pandemic, China recently banned wildlife trade and consumption, but although it’s supposed to be permanent, it remain to be seen whether it will be and there are already loopholes, since the use of wildlife in traditional medicine has been exempted.

The problem with blaming China for the pandemic on the ground that it didn’t ban wildlife trade is that we don’t actually know that Huanan Seafood Market had anything to do with the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 and, in fact, there are very good reasons to doubt it. Indeed, as I have already noted, according to a study published in New England Journal of Medicine, 45% of the cases who developed symptoms before January 1 had no known link to Huanan Seafood Market. Another study published in The Lancet noted that the earliest identified case had no known connection to Huanan Seafood Market and, among the first 4 cases, 3 also had no known links to it. Out of 41 people who had been hospitalized in Wuhan by January 2, only 27 had any known connection to Huanan Seafood Market. I know that people will dismiss those studies, because they were published by Chinese researchers, but this strikes me as totally unreasonable. Not only is there no evidence the data reviewed in those studies are fake, but it’s likely the Chinese authorities had no say in their publication, since as Caixin noted, they seem to have prompted the statement issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology on January 30, which criticized Chinese researchers for rushing to publish their findings in foreign journals instead of passing them along to the authorities.

A combination of genetic and epidemiological evidence also suggests that, while Huanan Seafood Market probably boosted the circulation of the virus in December, it didn’t originate from the market but started circulating somewhere else in Wuhan during the second half of November and was brought to Huanan Seafood Market later. This is the conclusion of a paper that used genome-wide and epidemiological data to infer the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. The details are a bit complicated, but I will give you the gist here. As a virus infects new hosts, reproduces inside them and then infects other hosts, it mutates and this results in different strains. Those differences accumulate over time and, after a while, they can even give rise to different species. By comparing the genomes of different strains of a virus, we can infer the evolutionary relationships between them, showing how they are related to each other. As it happens, another study found that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically 96% similar to RaTG13-CoV, a coronavirus previously detected in a bat found in Yunnan province, which suggests they have a common ancestor. So the authors of the paper mentioned above used the genome of this virus, together with the genomes of different strains of SARS-CoV-2, to infer the evolutionary relationships of the strains with each other and with RaTG13-CoV.

Here is the graph this analysis produced:Each node depicts a different haplotype, which you can think of as a family of genomes. The pie chart in each node shows where the samples in which the viruses whose genomes are part of this haplotype came from.

As you can see on this graph, RaTG13-CoV is most closely related to H15 and H31, which are both linked to H3, the haplotype found in Huanan Seafood Market, through H14. (Actually, H3 is not the only haplotype that was found in the market, but the others were derived from it.) No virus whose genome belonged to either H15, H31 or H14 was found in Huanan Seafood Market. This suggests that SARS-CoV-2 started circulated elsewhere in Wuhan and was only introduced in the market later. (However, a virus whose genome belongs to H14 was found in someone who lived 2km from the market, so even though he didn’t have any known connection to Huanan Seafood Market, it’s possible that he was nevertheless infected over there or by someone who came from there.) One complication for this story is that, as you can see on the graph, none of the samples in H15 or H31 came from Wuhan, but the people on which they were collected either visited Wuhan during the outbreak or have a plausible connection to Wuhan. Moreover, most of the samples in H14 came from outside Wuhan, although 2 of them were collected in Wuhan. So the authors make the hypothesis, which I find very plausible, that the people on which the samples in H15 and H31 have been collected were actually infected in Wuhan or by people who had been in Wuhan. Of course, as we get more data, this picture could change. In particular, although RaTG13-CoV is the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 we currently know about, it’s still pretty distantly related, since their common ancestor probably goes back several decades in the past. It’s possible that, if we knew about a more closely related non-human coronavirus and/or if we had more SARS-CoV-2 samples, H15 and H31 would no longer look like plausible ancestral haplotypes. (Another possible concern here is noise in the data resulting from sequencing error.) But this is the story that is suggested by the data we currently have. Another paper by a different team reached the same conclusion based on a similar argument and it’s also consistent with the phylogenetic analysis in this paper recently published in Nature.

The fact that several haplotypes were found in Huanan Seafood Market, which means there was already some genetic diversity over there, suggests that SARS-CoV-2 circulated for a while in the market before infecting people elsewhere. Thus, in this story, the market still figures prominently, since it served as a launching pad for the virus, but SARS-CoV-2 didn’t originate from over there and we don’t know that the wild animals sold in the market played any role. This is also consistent with what the genetic data say about SARS-CoV-2’s population history. According to the analysis in this study, the virus went through a first expansion on December 7, right before patients with a connection to Huanan Seafood Market started to show up in hospitals. (Remember that, as I noted above, the first 3 patients didn’t have any known connection to Huanan Seafood Market. No patient with a history of visiting the market developed symptoms until December 10.) Given what is known about the incubation period, this suggests that SARS-CoV-2 stated circulating in Wuhan sometime during the second half of November, reached Huanan Seafood Market at the beginning of December, where it circulated for a while before spreading to other of Hubei, China and finally the rest of the world. So the genetic evidence fits very nicely with the timeline I established in the first part and the story told by the Chinese. If the virus started circulating in late November, but didn’t really expand until it reached Huanan Seafood Market in early December, you wouldn’t expect a lot of people to show up in hospitals until mid-December and it wouldn’t be surprising that nobody in Wuhan detected a cluster of pneumonia until late December, which they associated with the market since back then most cases were connected to it.

I know that a lot of people don’t trust Chinese data, but genetic data are much harder to fake, so this should make you more confident that the epidemiological data about the beginning of the outbreak in Wuhan are accurate. (Of course, if you really don’t want to give up the belief that Chinese data are worthless, you can always come up with a story on which even the genetic data uploaded by Chinese researchers are not trustworthy. In particular, you could imagine that the information about where the samples were collected is not accurate, but this would be tricky to do without creating anomalies in the data and, at this point, I think you really ought to ask yourself why you’re even considering such a far-fetched scenario instead of accepting the much more parsimonious hypothesis that Chinese researchers are just honest.) Yet another paper claims that, according to interviews with residents and visitors of market, bats were not even sold at Huanan Seafood Market. But even if this were true, it wouldn’t rule out the theory that the outbreak originated from the market, since it’s widely thought that SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t passed directly to humans but through pangolins or another intermediary species. In short, while genetic and epidemiological data can’t rule out the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 spread to humans from wild animals in Huanan Seafood Market, it makes it somewhat unlikely.

Thus, we can probably blame China for not closing wildlife markets, but since we don’t know that Huanan Seafood Market is actually where the outbreak in Wuhan started and there are good reasons to doubt it, we can’t blame China for being responsible for the pandemic because it didn’t close wildlife markets. It would be like blaming someone who shot a gun at random for killing a kid who received a stray bullet nearby. Of course, we could blame him for shooting a gun at random, because that’s dangerous and stupid, but we surely couldn’t sentence him for manslaughter, especially if there were evidence suggesting that it wasn’t his bullet that killed the kid. In fact, while I think China should probably do more to fight wildlife trade and consumption, it’s unclear exactly how much we can blame it for not having closed wildlife markets. The evidence seems clear that a large proportion of emerging infectious diseases in humans not only come from animals, but specifically from wildlife. According to this study, between 1940 and 2004, 60.3% of emerging infectious diseases have originated from animals and, among those 60.3%, 71.8% originated from wildlife. In other words, during that period,  approximately 43% of emerging infectious diseases in humans came from wild animals. But it doesn’t mean they came from wildlife markets and, as far as I can tell, nobody has any idea how much the risk of pandemic would be reduced if China banned wildlife trade and consumption. Many other factors, such as population growth, urbanization, deforestation, etc., increase the risk of pandemic beside wildlife trade and consumption.

Again, my point is not that China shouldn’t ban wildlife markets or that it can’t be blamed for not having done so before, but exactly how blameworthy the Chinese government is presumably depends on how much wildlife trade and consumption increase the risk of pandemic exactly, but the truth is that nobody has any clue. In fact, that’s not even the relevant question here, the relevant question is rather what effect on the risk the measures that Beijing could take to fight wildlife trade and consumption would have, which depends not just on how much wildlife trade and consumption increase the risk of pandemic but also on how effective those measures would be. People talk as if the Chinese government would just have to press a button and wildlife trade would instantly stop, because they think of the Chinese Communist Party as this kind of omnipotent entity that controls everything that happens in China, but this is a fantasy. If only because of the ubiquitous corruption among local officials, which is not a problem that can be solved in a snap of a finger, there would probably still be a lot of wildlife trade going on. (In this interview, a professor of microbiology even argues that, by driving wildlife trade underground, it could even make things worse from a public health perspective. For various reasons I’m not going to get into, I don’t find his argument very plausible, but I guess it’s possible.) Of course, if the Chinese government really cracked down on it and started locking up people who violate the law in concentration camps, I’m sure it would have a very significant effect, but presumably that’s not what the people who are asking China to do something against wildlife trade want.

Finally, China is hardly the only country where people trade and eat wild animals, it’s ubiquitous in South-East Asia, Central Africa and many other places like Brazil. In fact, both Ebola and HIV, which caused one of the worst pandemics in history, have been linked to the consumption of bushmeat in Central Africa. If emerging infectious diseases so often originate from China rather than from another country where the trade and consumption of wild animals is widespread, it’s presumably because it’s home to almost 20% of the world population, not because the Chinese government is particularly bad on that issue. Again, it doesn’t mean that the Chinese government doesn’t deserve to be criticized for not doing more to fight wildlife trade and consumption, but it’s still important to recognize that, even if we knew for a fact that the pandemic of COVID-19 was caused by contacts with wild animals sold at Huanan Seafood Market (which not only we don’t but have very good reasons to doubt), there would still be a lot of moral luck involved. However, people don’t see that, because the pandemic happened to start in China and not in one of the many other countries that don’t fight against wildlife trade and consumption anymore than China does. In fact, a significant part of wildlife consumption in China seems to be satisfied by illegal wildlife trade from South East Asia or even Africa, but everyone just focuses on the Chinese part of the equation.