The marauding virus knows no border

It is not surprising that the Delta variety, which had originated in India and which is now widespread across the world, in the Americas, in Europe, in south-east Asia, has emerged in China, first in Wuhan, the original home of COVID-19, and in Nanjing, in the eastern part of the country.

It is suspected that it has spread from Nanjing to 17 other provinces. There were 71 new cases from local transmission, half of them from the Jiangsu province, of which Nanjing is the capital. Yangzhou, next to Nanjing, reported 119 cases on Tuesday. Another Covid-19 hotspot is Zhangjiejie. The city is close to scenic spots, which inspired the on-screen landscape of Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron’s futuristic take “Avatar.” Zhangjiejie has been sealed, and neither resident nor tourist can leave the city now. At the same time, the Communist Party’s disciplinary committee had issued a list of local officials who are supposed to have had a negative impact on the prevention of the pandemic and its control.

According to official figures, 1.71 billion vaccine doses have been administered to a population of 1.4 billion. It is not clear how many got the first doses, and how many both the doses.

The question arises as to how the latest mutation of COVID-19, the Delta variant, has found its way to China as well as different parts of the world. There is as yet no study to show that travellers from India, whether Indian or of other nationalities, had carried it into the different countries. In the early phase of COVID-19 in the first few months of 2020, there was clear evidence travellers from Wuhan to different countries, to India, to Italy, and then travellers from Europe to New York, were the unintentional carriers of the virus. This is a question that epidemiologists across the world may have to study with greater care.

One of the reasons that China was able to contain the first phase of COVID-19 was due to the relentless measures of lockdown that the Chinese authorities had imposed in China. It is a moot question then as to how Delta variant of COVID-19 had shown up in China. It is of course true that the Chinese authorities have swung into action and they are taking all the preventive measures like testing, quarantining to contain the latest variant, which is believed to transmit faster than the previous variants.

It is also the case that not even lessons have been drawn from the experience of China’s fight with virus. Unlike in other countries, including Japan, there is no scope for vaccine hesitation. People have no option but to take the COVID-19 vaccine and the Chinese have managed to develop and manufacture the vaccine towards the end of 2020.

As in its earlier phase, deaths due to COVID-19 have been very few compared to the hundreds of thousands of deaths across the world. The argument that it’s easier for the rigid Communist Party regime in China to enforce restrictions and people forced to comply with COVID-19 appropriate behaviour is indeed true. But even in a controlled site like the whole of China, COVID-19 and the deadly Delta variant seem to have crept in. It shows that the virus knows no boundaries, and its lines of infection are not only through human carriers.

For many months now, most Western countries, led by the United States, have been engaged in the blame game, where it is alleged that the outbreak of the pandemic in the first place is to be traced back to a leak from the virology laboratory in Wuhan. This has soured other lines of necessary communication between researchers in China and elsewhere.