The New York Times: 25 days that changed the face of the world ... How the Corona virus leaked from the grip of China

The American New York Times said that China has responded to the emerging corona virus (Covid-19) pandemic with amazing force, according to the description of its officials.

But the newspaper commented on this by saying that Beijing did not act until after it recovered from the political stalemate that caused the outbreak of the virus to become a global pandemic.

In a lengthy report, the newspaper monitored the developments of the pandemic since the virus was discovered in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and its spread throughout the world, before Beijing succeeded in controlling it locally.

In the course of the report - which is a documentation and "case book" of the epidemic - she discussed some of the political repercussions that resulted from the outbreak of the virus, especially the position of the US President Donald Trump's administration on it.

The newspaper began its report with the order issued by Beijing to the country's chief epidemiologist, Dr. Zhong Nanshan, to travel on an urgent mission to Wuhan to verify the emergence of a new and strange strain of the Corona virus.

The Chinese official novel describes epidemiologist Zhong Luhan's journey as an exciting turning point in the "victorious" war against Covid-19, when he discovered that the virus was spreading dangerously, so he quickly returned to Beijing to "sound the alarm."

And 4 days after his return, specifically on January 23, 2020, President Xi Jinping ordered the closure of Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus’s spread.

That closure was the first critical step in saving China, but the New York Times believes that isolating the city is a long-overdue decision that did not prevent the virus from seeping into the rest of the world, killing more than 1.7 million people.

The first alarm bell was ringed about 25 days earlier, on December 30, 2019, that is, exactly a year ago, thanks to Doctor Li Wenliang, who died in early February after being reprimanded for warning of the spread of Corona.

Even before that date, Chinese doctors and scientists were looking for answers, but officials in Wuhan and Beijing declined to disclose the extent of the infection, or refused to take action on the relevant warnings.

It is believed that the origin of the virus was a seafood market in Wuhan in early December.

The New York Times stated that it drew its information to prepare this report from Chinese government documents, interviews with a number of people, research papers and books, and accounts of sources and reports neglected or forbidden.

It was based on all these data in monitoring what happened in China in those 25 days that "changed the world."

According to the same newspaper, politics hindered science and created a state of tension between them that would define the pandemic.

The slowdown in China’s response led to the virus’s release from its head and spread to the world, and this signaled the outbreak of battles between scholars and political leaders over transparency, public health and economic aspects that affected all continents.

With the outbreak of "political hostilities" between China and the United States, scientists from both sides relied on global networks to share information, as they recognized early on that the virus might be contagious among humans.

China eventually succeeded in controlling both the virus and its news.

Today, the Chinese economy is booming, and some experts are even asking whether the emerging corona pandemic has contributed to tipping the global balance of power in favor of Beijing.

The New York Times says that the rise of China has angered President Trump, who has long blamed it for what he called the "Chinese virus."

The United States has not yet succeeded in containing the virus, and it is now paying a heavy price in the form of the large numbers of deaths and the impact of the pandemic on the economy, at a time when life in China is relatively normal.

Until recently, the United States and China were cooperating in tracking and limiting virus outbreaks in China, but the Trump administration withdrew nearly 10 of its experts from Beijing just months before the outbreak of the Covid-19 infection, and closed its eyes to the threat coming from there.

A previous study stated that China could have reduced the number of cases of the epidemic by 66%, if its officials had dealt with the virus a week earlier, and if they had acted 3 weeks before the outbreak of the pandemic, the number of cases would have decreased by 95%.

China's reluctance to show transparency about those first weeks has caused major gaps in the nature of the information that the world knows about the Coronavirus, as scientists did not have sufficient knowledge of where the virus was first discovered, nor how it appeared, and this is due - according to the American newspaper - Until Beijing postponed an independent investigation into the origins of the animals behind the outbreak.