If we had known where the virus came from in December 2019 and January 2020, that knowledge would have changed the response considerably.
Pointing out that the origin of the virus matters enormously, Rich wrote that knowing the virus escaped from a lab “wouldn’t have changed how we responded to the pandemic in real time.”
Actually, I’m pretty sure it would have changed the response considerably.
If the virus was accidentally released from a laboratory, that means it was being researched in a laboratory. Which means someone, and probably several researchers, within the Wuhan Institute of Virology already knew some things about this particular virus when Wuhan residents started showing up at hospitals with strange new viral infections throughout December. It means that when the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission sent out an “urgent notice on the treatment of pneumonia of unknown cause” to doctors and hospitals about it on December 30, 2019, someone in within the Wuhan Institute of Virology recognized, “oh, guano, that’s one of ours,” and chose to remain silent about it, instead of saying to doctors in the city and around the world, “yes, that’s a virus we were studying, and so far we’ve learned X, Y, and Z about it.”
If the virus was accidentally released from a laboratory, those researching it undoubtedly understood its contagiousness. This means someone within the Wuhan Institute of Virology knew the Wuhan and Chinese governments were lying when they said the virus couldn’t be transferred from one human being to another, every day from December 31 to January 20. Many medical staff on the ground strongly suspected the virus was contagious and that the official statements were false; someone at WIV could have let them and the world know for certain much sooner. The late Dr. Li Wenliang, the doctor who tried to warn his colleagues and who was brought into a police station for his efforts, might have been better prepared for the threat that ultimately claimed his life.
An early announcement of a lab leak probably would have prevented the World Health Organization from declaring on January 14, “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.”
If this was a lab leak and WIV announced the leak as soon as they realized it, the quarantine of the city could have and would have started much sooner. The city authorities probably would not have allowed 40,000 families to host a Lunar New Year banquet on January 18. The Wuhan Evening News newspaper would probably not have neglected to mention the ongoing pandemic on its front page from January 5 to January 20.
And it’s possible, even probable, that the U.S. would have enacted a much stricter travel ban much sooner — certainly from Wuhan, if not from all of China. The last direct flight from Wuhan, China, to John F. Kennedy Airport landed January 23, 2020. Entry screening for passengers from China would have started immediately, instead of starting January 17. In January 2020, more than 1,300 flights from China carrying 381,000 passengers arrived at 17 U.S. airports.
When you’ve got a new contagious virus that is particularly dangerous, the sooner you take action, the more likely you are to contain it and prevent the worst-case scenarios. The more you wait, the more the virus spreads, and the worse the problem gets. Wuhan and the world spent the first vital weeks of this pandemic unsure of what they were dealing with, debating whether it was contagious (when it pretty obviously was, if doctors who had never been near the Huanan Seafood Market were getting infected shortly after interacting with patients).
Beyond that… how would — or will — the entire world react if the conclusion of the ordeal of the COVID-19 pandemic was not, “a random chance encounter between a bat and a person led to the pandemic that killed your loved one” but instead, “reckless research and sloppy safety practices in a Chinese-government-run lab led to the pandemic that killed your loved one”?