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potential causes of pandemics or re-
spiratory disease,” says Dr. Ian Lipkin,
director of the center for infection and
immunity at Columbia University Mail-
man School of Public Health.
That changed in 2002, when SARS
first emerged from China. Of the 8,000
people ultimately confirmed to have the
respiratory disease, up to 10% died, wak-
ing public-health experts to the dangers
of a virus that had jumped from bats to
cats and dogs, and then to people. In
Wuhan, officials believe 2019-nCoV
made such a leap inside the city’s Huanan
market. Rows of blue stalls housed count-
less purveyors of exotic, wild animals for
consumption. “I saw live hedgehogs, por-
cupines, that kind of thing,” says Alan
Laine, 57, a physics teacher from the
U.K. who has lived in Wuhan since 2002.
“It wasn’t exactly hidden.” The market
has been shuttered since Jan. 1, though
officials in white hazmat suits contin-
ued to sift through evidence when TIME
visited on Jan. 22.
Movement across species is what
makes virus experts nervous. Because
of their sloppy genetic copying, viruses
mutate all the time. By chance, the new
aberrations sometimes make a strain
more adept at living in a new host—and
in some cases, those changes make it more
virulent as well.
In some respects, the outbreak in
Wuhan might have been inevitable. Ralph
Baric, professor of epidemiology at Uni-
versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and an expert on the genetic sequences
of coronaviruses, has worked with Chi-
nese researchers since 2002 to better
understand this family of microbes and
how its members infect human cells to
cause major respiratory symptoms.
From bats, Baric and his team ex-
tracted a series of coronaviruses that var-
ied genetically from SARS by anywhere
from 2% to 12%. Those differences hinted
that some were primed to jump from bats
to people, and cause serious disease. Hisfindings should have rung alarm bells, he
says. “We made strong predictions that
these corona viruses were poised for re-
emergence in human populations.” In De-
cember, that prediction came true, when a
mysterious pneumonia-like illness began
spreading in the city of Wuhan.
It’s not a mystery how authorities
should respond to a new infectious dis-
ease; by and large, it’s been the same for
thousands of years. Since typhoid fever
struck Athens in 430 B.C.—among the
first recorded outbreaks—to the black
plague in Europe during the 1300s, and
the more contemporary 1918 influenza
pandemic, isolation and quarantine have
been the most effective ways to contain
a highly contagious infectious agent and
prevent it from decimating an entire pop-
ulation of people.
Yet in China, those lessons weren’t
always followed, despite the recent leg-
acy of SARS. Although scientists in China
quickly identified the new coronavirus,
public-health officials were slow to ad-
vise people about how best to protect
themselves. It took President Xi nearly
a month after the first cases emerged in
Wuhan to finally address the health crisis
publicly, and local health officials say that
delay tied their hands. As Wuhan Mayor
Zhou Xianwang explained on CCTV on
Jan. 27, “As a local official, I could only
disclose information after being autho-
rized [by the central government]. A lot
of people don’t understand this.” Indeed,
the wife of a doctor in a Wuhan hospi-
tal told TIME that her husband had been
instructed not to discuss the coronavirus
situation and the government’s response
with anyone.
The top-down leadership structure of
Xi’s government leaves local health de-
partments with little authority to issue
alerts or take any action, snarling pub-
lic health and politics at the expense of
human lives. Train conductors were re-
portedly initially told not to wear masks
to avoid generating more panic among
passengers, just days before the entire
rail system was shut down. “People didn’t
realize the severity of the situation,” says
a graphic designer from Wuhan who
provided only her last name, Tao. “They
thought the virus was controllable and
not contagious. The government did not
publish the facts in time, and they failed
to control the epidemic.”^
Earthmovers build one of two new
hospitals the government ordered to
treat coronavirus cases in Wuhan