lørdag 23. januar 2021

Wuhan marks its anniversary with triumph and denial

Wuhan has long since recovered from the world's first outbreak of Covid-19. It is now being remembered not as a disaster but as a victory, and with an insistence that the virus came from somewhere - anywhere - but here. From the moment a new, pandemic coronavirus emerged in the same city as a laboratory dedicated to the study of new coronaviruses with pandemic potential, Professor Shi Zhengli has found herself the focus of one of the biggest scientific controversies of our time. For much of the past year she has met the suggestion that Sars-Cov-2 might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology with angry denial. 

Now though, she has offered her own thoughts on how the initial outbreak may have begun in the city. In an article in this month's edition of Science Magazine she referred to a number of studies that, she said, suggest the virus existed outside of Chinabefore Wuhan's first known case in December 2019.