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2020/2/17
The Chinese coronavirus
Time and again
A new virus is spreading.
Fortunately, the world is better prepared than ever to stop it
As The Economist went to press, over 600 cases had been confirmed in six countries, of which 17 were fatal. The new virus is a close relative of sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which emerged in China in 2002 and terrorised the world for over half a year before burning out. sars afflicted more than 8,000 people and killed about 800, leaving in its wake $30bn-100bn of damage from disrupted trade and travel.
That toll would have been lower if the Chinese authorities had not hushed up the outbreak for months. But things are very different this time. The Chinese have been forthcoming and swift to act. Doctors in Wuhan, the metropolis where it began, have come in for criticism, but the signs are that they promptly sounded an alarm about an unusual cluster of cases of pneumonia—thereby following a standard protocol协议 for spotting new viruses.
The WHO has long worried about the possible emergence of a “disease x” that could become a serious international pandemic and which has no known counter-measures. Some experts say the virus found in China could be a threat of this kind. And there will be many others. Further illnesses will follow the same well-trodden path, by mutating from bugs that live in animals into ones that can infect people. Better vigilance in places where humans and animals mingle, as they do in markets across Asia, would help catch viral newcomers early. A tougher task is dissuading people from eating wild animals and convincing them to handle livestock with care, using masks and gloves when butchering meat and fish, for example. Such measures might have prevented the new coronavirus from ever making headlines.
2020/2/18
The apotheosis of Chinese cuisine in America
Its upward trajectory reflects the Chinese-American community’s
Chinese restaurants began to open in America in the mid-19th century, clustering on the west coast where the first immigrants landed.
They mostly served an Americanised version of Cantonese cuisine—chop suey, egg fu yung and the like. In that century and much of the 20th, the immigrants largely came from China’s south-east, mainly Guangdong province.
After the immigration reforms of 1965 removed ethnic quotas that limited non-European inflows, Chinese migrants from other regions started to arrive.
Restaurants began calling their food “Hunan” and “Sichuan”, and though it rarely bore much resemblance to what was actually eaten in those regions, it was more diverse and boldly spiced than the sweet, fried stuff that defined the earliest Chinese menus.
By the 1990s adventurous diners in cities with sizeable Chinese populations could choose from an array of regional cuisines. A particular favourite was Sichuan food, with its addictively numbing fire (the Sichuan peppercorn has a slightly anaesthetising, tongue-buzzing effect).
Yet over the decades, as Chinese food became ubiquitous, it also—beyond the niche world of connoisseurs—came to be standardised. There are almost three times as many Chinese restaurants in America (41,000) as McDonald’s.
Virtually every small town has one and, generally, the menus are consistent: pork dumplings (steamed or fried); the same two soups (hot and sour, wonton); stir-fries listed by main ingredient, with a pepper icon or star indicating a meagre trace of chilli-flakes. Dishes over $10 are grouped under “chef’s specials”.
There are modest variations: in Boston, takeaways often come with bread and feature a dark, molasses-sweetened sauce; a Chinese-Latino creole cuisine developed in upper Manhattan. But mostly you can, as at McDonald’s, order the same thing in Minneapolis as in Fort Lauderdale.
2020/2/19
Obituary Li Wenliang The man who knew
Dr Li Wenliang, one of the first to raise the alarm about a new coronavirus, died of it on February 7th, aged 33
Busy though he was as an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central hospital, rushed off his feet, Li Wenliang never missed a chance to chat about his favourite things on Weibo. Food, in particular.
Since he shared every passing observation online, it was not surprising that on December 30th he put up a post about an odd cluster of pneumonia cases at the hospital. They were unexplained, but the patients were in quarantine, and they had all worked in the same place, the pungent litter-strewn warren of stalls that made up the local seafood market. Immediately this looked like person-to-person transmission to him, even if it might have come initially from bats, or some other delicacy. Immediately, too, it raised the spectre of the sars virus of 2002-03 which had killed more than 700 people. He therefore decided to warn his private WeChat group, all fellow alumni from Wuhan University, to take precautions. He headed the post: “Seven cases of sars in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market”. That was his mistake.
The trouble was that he did not know whether it was actually sars. He had posted it too fast. In an hour he corrected it, explaining that although it was a coronavirus, like sars, it had not been identified yet. But to his horror he was too late: his first post had already gone viral, with his name and occupation undeleted, so that in the middle of the night he was called in for a dressing down at the hospital, and January 3rd he was summoned to the police station.
On January 8th an 82-year-old patient presented with acute angle-closure glaucoma and, because she had no fever, he treated her without a mask. She too turned out to run a stall in the market, and she had other odd symptoms, including loss of appetite and pulmonary lesions suggesting viral pneumonia. It was the new virus, and by January 10th he had begun to cough. The next day he put an n95 mask on. Not wanting to infect the family, he sent them to his in-laws 200 miles away, and checked into a hotel. He was soon back in the hospital, this time in an isolation ward. On February 1st a nucleic-acid test showed positive for the new coronavirus. Well, that’s it then, confirmed, he wrote on Weibo from his bed.