LIVE: Life in Wuhan One Year After the Coronavirus Outbreak

(Dec. 30) In the year since seafood hawkers started appearing at Wuhan’s hospitals sickened with a strange and debilitating pneumonia, the world has learned a lot about Covid-19, from the way it spreads to how to inoculate against the infection. Despite these advances, a chasm remains in our understanding of the virus that’s killed nearly 2 million people and whipsawed the global economy: we still don’t know how it began.

Where the pathogen first emerged and how it transmitted to humans is a stubborn mystery, one that’s becoming more elusive with each passing month. Before the initial cluster among stall-holders at a produce market in central China, the trail largely goes cold, and the country the novel coronavirus hit first — the place many blame for unleashing the disease on an under-prepared world — now has little incentive to help find the true origin of the greatest public health emergency in a century.

China has effectively snuffed out Covid-19, thanks to stringent border curbs, mass testing and a surveillance network that allows infected people and their contacts to be tracked via mobile phone data. With the fight over the pandemic’s source becoming an extension of the broader conflict between the world’s two superpowers, China is now trying to revise the virus narrative from the beginning, and nowhere is that more evident than at the original epicenter: Wuhan.

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