China must co-operate on Covid

Residents queue to take nucleic acid tests for the coronavirus in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province as the city tests its entire population for Covid-19. Picture: AFP

With even the Chinese Communist Party’s servile Global Times propaganda mouthpiece admitting fresh Covid-19 outbreaks are “the most serious since Wuhan”, there can be no doubt about the challenge China faces as the fast-moving Delta variant sweeps across the country. As Will Glasgow reported on Wednesday, officials in Wuhan – ground zero of the devastating pandemic – spoke of the city being once more in a “wartime state”. Following the discovery of what were claimed to be seven Delta cases, Wuhan’s 11 million citizens were ordered to undergo testing and not to travel. Similar alarm was evident in major cities elsewhere, with all China’s 31 provinces ordering the country’s 1.4 billion people not to travel domestically, a move that will devastate the peak summer holiday season. Instead, people have been told to stay home and get tested.

In Beijing, a city of 22 million people, 80 per cent of whom have been vaccinated, reports of new Delta cases led local CCP boss Cai Qi to warn: “(Beijing) must be guarded at all costs. From top to bottom, the city needs to be on the alert.” Similar indications of serious concern were apparent in Yangzhou, near the eastern city of Nanjing, where airport workers were first exposed to Delta by travellers from Russia. Nanjing’s nine million people have been undergoing rigorous testing, while in Yangzhou CCP officials have offered $1040 cash rewards for fingering Delta suspects, and twice that amount if they test positive.

Given Beijing’s lack of candour and unrelenting obfuscation since the pandemic started, it is no surprise Chinese officials are being no more forthcoming in the current Delta crisis than they were after the original Wuhan outbreak. On Monday, the Global Times reported “more than 320 domestically transmitted cases across China”. It added ominously that they were “posing serious challenges to the country’s hard-won victory in the pandemic battle”.

Whatever the true numbers, it will be a pity if China’s leaders do not learn the lesson that emerges from their obvious alarm about the Delta outbreak: that it is overwhelmingly in China’s best interests, as much as those of the rest of the world, to investigate and establish how the pandemic started and spread to become the monster that it is. Like China, much of the world is being attacked by Delta. Another variant that is potentially deadlier, Lambda, is sweeping South America. It doubtless will reach China in due course.

Even Beijing’s placeman at the World Health Organisation, director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has pleaded that Beijing help in facilitating a full and unfettered independent investigation into Covid-19’s origins. He effectively echoed the sensible call made first by Scott Morrison last year and subsequently supported by all 194 members of the World Health Assembly. Last week, Australian chief scientist Cathy Foley joined her counterparts from the US, Japan and countries across Europe in calling on China to let the WHO get on with a full investigation. “China’s full participation in this scientific examination is a matter of critical importance to the world,” they jointly declared.

Despite the Delta onslaught, however, Beijing remains incomprehensibly defiant and unhelpful, rejecting even Dr Tedros’s entreaties. Just as it will doubtless remain defiant in the face of US congressional claims, reported on Thursday by Adam Creighton, that the virus accidentally was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as early as September 2019. A report by Republican members of a powerful congressional committee “completely dismissed” the notion the virus emerged from a wet market. It alleged a massive cover-up by the CCP and echoed previous claims the virus was spread by infecting hundreds of athletes at the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 2019.

Doubtless that claim will provoke further Chinese ire. But a far more sensible approach from Beijing would be to recognise the threat posed to itself and the rest of the world by Delta and even more deadly strains of the virus and accept the urgent need for a full investigation into its origins. While the extent of the Delta surge in China may not yet be fully known, the threat the country and the rest of the world continues to face is abundantly clear.

President Xi Jinping would do well to recognise that it is in China’s own interests to allow the full investigation into Covid-19’s origins that potentially would help find ways to deal with the ever more deadly emerging strains.