The first person infected with the coronavirus was a 70-year-old man admitted to the Wuhan Central Hospital, with high fever and pneumonia, in early December 2019. The news did not spread, but hundreds of more patients followed in the following days with the same symptoms. It was then that China first sent a series of samples to be analyzed, to identify the cause of the new disease.
On December 30, around 4:00 p.m., the head of the Wuhan Hospital Emergency Department received the results. When she read the report, she felt cold sweat all over her body, as she herself later admitted. At the top of it you could read the following words surrounded by a red circle: “Sars Coronavirus”. A twenty-day race against time began in which the Beijing government hid the terrible pandemic.
An hour and a half later, a screenshot of the report reached a doctor in the ophthalmology department at the same hospital, who in turn shared it with hundreds of people in his class group at the university. Along with the image, he added the following warning: “Do not circulate this message outside the group. Make your families and your loved ones take precautions.
That was the beginning of everything. In the podcast we interviewed the director of the Basque Museum of the History of Medicine, Anton Erkoreka Barrena, author of ‘A new history of the Spanish flu: parallels with Covid-19’ (Lamiñarra, 2020): «Now we know that in the autumn of 2019 the virus was already circulating in China. The authorities did not report it and even some doctors who made public that a serious health problem had arisen were repressed. Chinese medicine is as developed as in Europe or America, another thing is that the information they obtain reaches the rest of the world. The Chinese government is opaque.”
We tell you in the podcast how the plot was woven to hide the origin of the Covid-19 while it spread throughout the world…
Credits
Screenplay and production: Israel Viana.
edition: Manuel Garré.
voiceover: Manuel Garre, Blanca Nava and Israel Viana.
Collaboration: Anton Erkoreka Barrena.
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