News of the Day
Well over 3 million people have been killed by COVID-19 around the world, including over half a million in this country. (One new study says the 3 million number is an underestimate, and that the real number is 7 million.) India is undergoing a horrific national nightmare, and Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy writes that it is “hard to convey the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and the indignity that people are being subjected to.” The deaths are only part of the true costs. There is also the economic cost, the joblessness, and the terror, as well as the trauma of watching relatives die excruciating deaths.
Yet we still don’t know how it all started. Searches for the animal that transmitted COVID-19 to humans have turned up nothing. The theory that the virus originated in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market has been abandoned, but nobody knows exactly how it did start infecting humans. We know it first showed up in Wuhan, China and that it probably originated in a bat. There are those who believe that the virus escaped from a lab, and those who insist it passed directly from animals to humans. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) most recent report on COVID’s origins suggests it’s “very likely” the virus passed from bats to humans through another animal, but also “likely” that it might have directly spread from bats to humans. The WHO calls the theory that it leaked from a lab “extremely unlikely.”
It’s easy to think that, given the reality we are stuck with, the question is mostly of interest to research scientists. Obviously, those who want to prevent another pandemic want to know exactly how this one started. But for the rest of us, why should we care very much? The virus is here, no fact about how it got here is going to change that. Many of the people pushing the theory that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan (e.g. Donald Trump) have been clearly ideologically opposed to China already. If it turned out the virus did come from a lab, there is a risk that the already Sinophobic political climate in the U.S. and elsewhere would get significantly worse. I have not been particularly interested in the origins of COVID-19 myself, even though I want researchers to find out the truth in order to improve future pandemic preparedness.
