The nightmare began in central China, in Hubei province: at Wuhan’s wet market, wild animals and seafood are piled, hugger mugger, on top of each other and sold. In December 2019, some of the people who work there started to develop unusual symptoms. Initially, the Chinese regime tried to silence local doctors, but the unknown virus spread at an alarming rate. It appears to have been transmitted to humans from the pangolin, which got it from bats.
Enter the New Year: the World Health Organisation (WHO) is notified. The virus is spreading to the population of Wuhan, and ultimately the whole of China. The case then moves outside the Empire: around mid-January, people who have been in Wuhan test positive, first in Thailand, then Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Canada, Dubai… Airline passengers travelling from China are required to undergo screening tests. Cases are also confirmed in Seattle (USA), Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Australia. The coronavirus is becoming famous.
Europe seemed to have been spared by the bug: but not for long! As early as 24 January, France discovers two cases in Paris and one in Bordeaux – all in Chinese nationals: phew! The same happened in Finland on the 29th of the month and in Italy on the 30th. In Germany, however, people showing no symptoms at all were found to be infected on the 28th. A German national in the Canary Islands was also diagnosed. January would close with the identification of further cases (Sweden, the United Kingdom, Russia, USA, India, Philippines), but they were not high in number and the mortality rate was low: let the Chinese sort out their own mess and we need lose no sleep over it, was what most people were still thinking. If the Europeans had acted then to cancel flights to the hotspots of the epidemic in Asia and tested all passengers arriving from them, a lot of lives could have been saved.
Nonetheless, the European Commission earmarked €10 million from the ‘Horizon 2020’ programme to stimulate research into this new virus. The Council of the EU woke up on 29 January, ‘envisaging’ a meeting of the health ministers. The next day, over at the European Parliament, a single response was called for, but with no emphasis on the urgency of the situation. But even then, it was known that (1) the virus was able to spread extremely quickly, (2) a person could transmit it even if they were showing no symptoms and (3) at least six countries of the EU were already affected.
Things started to move on in February. There was the first death outside China, in the Philippines, on the second of the month. The Commission sent its deepest sympathies to the family of Dr Li Wenliang, a whistleblower who was poorly treated by the regime and who succumbed to the virus on 6 February. It sent sanitary equipment to China and started to support the repatriation of Europeans. The disease spread on board a huge cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, sailing through Asia under a British flag: its 3700 passengers were placed into quarantine in the port of Yokohama by the Japanese authorities. In the meantime, on the ninth of the month, France got a nasty surprise when it discovered infected British subjects in Haute-Savoie, requiring the entire station of Contamines-Montjoie to be disinfected. Two days later, Germany registered 16 cases of COVID-19. The EU began to worry that there could be a shortage of medical equipment.
It was not until Thursday 13 February that the EU health ministers held their extraordinary meeting, by request of just three member states (Germany, France and Italy). The International Energy Agency expressed concerns at a possible collateral effect of the spread of the virus: a drop in global demand for oil. The death toll hit the 2000 mark in China on the 19th of the month; flights from the country were finally suspended. New cases were observed in around a dozen non-European countries: South Korea (which was hit very hard), Egypt, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Algeria, Pakistan, Brazil…
But death started to knock on our door as well. On 15 February, there was the first death of the victim outside Asia, in Paris; the victim was Chinese, but that would not be the case in Italy six days later. The north of the peninsula became an extremely dangerous epicentre. On 21 February, some 20 towns in Lombardi and Venezia closed access to public places. A meeting of the ministers of Italy and its neighbouring countries was held on 25 February. Regional quarantine measures were taken, but Tuscany, Liguria and Sicily were very soon hit by the virus. At the end of the month, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Denmark, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Ireland joined the unfortunate club, bringing its membership numbers to 14 in total. But the burden of suffering would be spread less evenly. Case numbers rose past 1000 in Italy, which already had a death toll of 30, most of them from Lombardi; France reached 100 cases, with an outbreak in Oise; the disease was also spreading through Germany (Hamburg, Rhineland-Westphalia, Hessen, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg).
The WHO judged the risk of a pandemic to be ‘very high’. Whilst all this was going on, the EU was licking its wounds over the failure of the European Council to agree on the 2021-2027 multi-annual financial framework and all the rest of its attention was on the serious situation in Syria and the region. As far as the virus was concerned, the first thing the institutions did was to take steps to protect their own staff.
March would force them to widen their concerns very quickly. (To be continued).
Renaud Denuit
See part 1: EUROPE 12466/1