On the morning of New Year's Day, I posted this item from Beijing News: China: Wuhan South China Seafood Market has been closed, unexplained pneumonia has a mature surveillance system.
I also posted an item from the South China Morning Post: World Health Organisation in touch with Beijing after mystery viral pneumonia outbreak.
As usual, when some outbreak occurs, I started rummaging through whatever local media I could find, and posted a story from Wuhan's Yangtze Daily: China: No human-to-human transmission of pneumonia in Wuhan.
And this from Chutian Dushi Bao: China: 8 people spread false information about pneumonia and were processed.
That was it. My running stories at the time were the tenth Ebola outbreak and the Australian wildfires. But the "mystery viral pneumonia" had clearly grabbed the attention of the Chinese health system (and the Chinese cops), and it was precisely the kind of event that Flublogia evolved to cover. The response online was very much like those in the early days of H1N1, cholera in Haiti, Zika in Latin America, and Ebola in West Africa and DR Congo: something undiagnosed had emerged, people were getting very sick, and no one seemed to know what it was.
But as grim as those earlier outbreaks turned out to be, they didn't turn the world upside down. Six months after they started, they were still killing people, but (except for H1N1) they were relatively contained in parts of the world of little interest to the "advanced" nations.
Not this time. After the past six months, we have no business calling ourselves "advanced." COVID-19 has shaken us all, exposing our every weakness and failure without giving us a moment's respite to remedy our political and structural flaws. This is a different world from New Year's Day 2020, and all we can say about New Year's Day 2021 is that it too will dawn on a world very different from today's.
