Scientists released a pair of extensive studies on Saturday that point to a market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. Analyzing data from a variety of sources, they concluded that the coronavirus was very likely present in live mammals sold in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late 2019 and suggested that the virus twice spilled over into people working or shopping there. They said they found no support for an alternate theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. Members of the Wuhan…
Tag: Wuhan (China)
In Wuhan, China, Anniversary of First Covid Lockdown Passes Quietly
Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid-19 first emerged in late 2019, began the world’s first coronavirus lockdown two years ago Sunday, shutting down public transportation and restricting departures for what proved to be 76 days. Since that move — stunning at the time — lockdowns of varying sizes and strictness have been carried out around the world. Now China, which has largely kept the virus at bay since quashing that first wave in Wuhan and other cities, is battling the far more contagious Omicron variant, shortly before the Winter Olympics…
Xi’an Is China’s Biggest Covid Challenge Since Wuhan
Every two days at the University of Xi’an in China, cleaners dressed in white hazmat suits taped tight to their bodies disinfect the dormitory hallways. Zhang Shengzi, a 24-year-old student, said the smell is so pungent she has to wait some time after they’ve gone before she will open her door again. She can barely leave her room, let alone campus, and all her classes are online. Ms. Zhang’s university, like the rest of Xi’an, has been under a citywide lockdown since Dec. 22. It is the longest lockdown in…
Origin of Virus May Remain Murky, U.S. Intelligence Agencies Say
WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies are unlikely to be able to draw a firm conclusion about the origin of the novel coronavirus without more information from China on the earliest cases or new scientific discoveries about the nature of the virus, said a newly declassified intelligence report released on Friday. President Biden ordered the nation’s intelligence agencies in May to conduct a 90-day inquiry into the origins of the pandemic. When the key findings of that review were released in August, they failed to offer a single answer and instead…
Intelligence Review Yields No Firm Conclusion on Origins of Coronavirus
WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have not been able to determine if the coronavirus pandemic was the result of an accidental leak from a lab or if it emerged more naturally, according to declassified portions of a report to the White House that were released on Friday. The nation’s spy agencies, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said, are unlikely to reach a conclusion without more cooperation from China or new sources of information. In a statement, President Biden said the United States would continue working to understand…
Rejecting Covid-19 Inquiry, China Peddles Conspiracy Theories Blaming US
Wary of independent scrutiny, Beijing has tightly controlled efforts by the World Health Organization to investigate the origin of the outbreak, and it rejected the health agency’s recent call for a second phase of an inquiry that would look more closely at the lab theory. China has been ramping up its disinformation campaign ahead of the results of an investigation by American intelligence agencies, ordered by President Biden. The agencies delivered their report on the origin of the pandemic to the president on Tuesday but have not yet concluded whether…
‘Window Is Rapidly Closing’ to Gather Key Evidence on Virus Origins, Scientists Say
Experts studying the origins of the coronavirus for the World Health Organization warned on Wednesday that the inquiry had “stalled” and that further delays could make it impossible to recover crucial evidence about the beginning of the pandemic. “The window is rapidly closing on the biological feasibility of conducting the critical trace-back of people and animals inside and outside China,” the experts wrote in an editorial in the journal Nature. Several studies of blood samples and wildlife farms in China were urgently needed to understand how Covid-19 emerged, they said.…
Zhang Zhan, Chinese Citizen Journalist, Is Ailing From Hunger Strike
A Chinese citizen journalist who was imprisoned for exposing the failures of the government’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is seriously ill from a hunger strike, according to messages from her family shared by her former lawyer and a friend. The journalist, Zhang Zhan, 37, had traveled to Wuhan from her home in Shanghai and spent the early days of the outbreak documenting the city’s strict lockdown and the severe impact it had on residents’ livelihoods and freedoms. Ms. Zhang’s reports challenged the government’s efforts to portray…