While rumors have swirled that the coronavirus pandemic originated in bats and then infected another animal that passed it onto people at a market in the southeastern Chinese city of Wuhan, scientists have not yet determined exactly how the new coronavirus infected people.

But these kinds of wet markets, which have long included bizarre and unusual items, are known to operate in not the most sanitary conditions.

“You’ve got live animals, so there’s feces everywhere. There’s blood because of people chopping them up,” Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which works to protect wildlife and public health from emerging diseases, told the Associated Press last month.

“Wet markets,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, are places “for the sale of fresh meat, fish, and produce.” They also sell an array of exotic animals.

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, before its closure, advertised dozens of species such as giant salamanders, baby crocodiles and raccoon dogs that were often referred to as wildlife, even when they were farmed, according to the AP.

And like many other “wet markets” in Asia and elsewhere, the animals at the Wuhan market lived in close proximity as they were tied up or stacked in cages.

Animals in “wet markets” are often killed on-site to ensure freshness — yet the messy mix raises the odds that a new virus will jump to people handling the animals and start to spread, experts say.

“I visited the Tai Po wet market in Hong Kong, and it’s quite obvious why the term ‘wet’ is used,” an NPR reporter wrote about them earlier this year.

“Live fish in open tubs splash water all over the floor. The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted right in front of the customers’ eyes. Live turtles and crustaceans climb over each other in boxes,” he described. “Melting ice adds to the slush on the floor. There’s lots of water, blood, fish scales and chicken guts. Things are wet.”

RFA noted that it could not independently verify that the Chinese Communist Party was burning coronavirus patients alive, nor has the Communist Party confirmed or denied the rumors. Yet the rumors persist that, to make room for new patients in Wuhan’s overcrowded hospitals, medical staff chose older patients less likely to survive the infection and shipped them to incinerators while they were still alive and conscious.

RFA quoted a source “close to the funeral industry” identified only as Ma who said that he had heard reports of “people restrained and forced into body bags when they were still moving.”

“Some people are saying that … there are video clips of screams coming from funeral homes, from inside the furnaces … which tells us that some people were taken to the funeral homes while they were still alive,” Ma added.

Ma also noted the existence of video testimony from an anonymous older woman who had been treated at a Wuhan hospital, presumably for Chinese coronavirus.

“One old lady was saying that they put one guy into … a body bag when he wasn’t even dead yet, and took him off to the crematorium because there was no way of saving him,” Ma told RFA.

Video of an older woman speaking anonymously to a camera began circulating on social media in February in which she said she witnessed a patient next to her at a Wuhan hospital stuffed into a body bag while still alive.

“He’s not dead, his feet and hands are still moving,” the woman says, “[They] wrapped him in a plastic body bag and zipped it up.”

According to New Tang Dynasty, a broadcaster affiliated with the persecuted Chinese Falun Gong movement, the woman spoke with a Wuhan accent, suggesting she was a native of the central Chinese city.

The Taiwanese outlet Taiwan News traced the origin of the video to a Chinese student group called “Youth Production,” who reportedly uploaded the video on February 24. Taiwan News noted that the woman claimed to have suffered from coronavirus symptoms but, as she was in her 60s, she did not suffer severe symptoms, unlike the man taken away, who she estimated was in his 70s.

“She said that the man was weak but was still breathing when medical workers ‘bound his head’ and then his hands and feet, which were ‘still moving,’” Taiwan News reported, noting that she also lamented that the hospital where she received care had no other treatments available for coronavirus patients besides oxygen. In the West, doctors have begun experimenting with several drug mixtures, one of which — a combination of antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat lupus and malaria — has generated optimism in American hospitals.

The woman said she felt older patients at the hospital were treated “like dead dogs.”

Neither Taiwan News nor RFA could independently confirm the reports of Wuhan residents being burned alive.

The Chinese Communist Party claims that, as of Tuesday, it has documented 82,718 cases of coronavirus nationwide and 3,335 deaths across the country. The vast majority of these, 3,212 deaths, were recorded in Hubei province. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei.

Multiple reports citing sources in Wuhan’s seven funeral homes dispute this claim, estimating that the real death toll in the city is as much as ten to forty times higher than China’s official nationwide death toll. Reports of hundreds of bodies cremated in some funeral homes began surfacing in February, at the height of the epidemic in the city. Government officials did not allow residents to pick up the remains of their relatives until late March, however, as the strict lockdown that saw government officials welding Wuhan residents in their homes was still ongoing.

When the funeral homes opened to distributed ashes two weekends ago, witnesses estimated that some funeral homes were distributing as many as 5,000 sets of remains a day. Estimates as to the number of sets of remains distributed last week in Wuhan range from 30,000 to 46,000 people.

“There are suspicions that many people died in their homes without being diagnosed and, at first, there were no kits to do the test,” an unnamed resident said in a report last week. “Nobody in Wuhan believes the official numbers. The real one, only they know.”

Ma, the funeral home source speaking to RFA in its report on Monday, said that Wuhan was cremating so many bodies at some point that some incinerators broke down, resulting in cremators placing multiple bodies in one incinerator at a time to keep up with the sheer amount of remains. The result has been several reported incidents of people receiving urns with ashes featuring items they do not recognize that clearly did not belong to their loved ones.

“A resident of Wuhan’s Jiang’an district surnamed Liu said she had found a man’s belt clasp in the urn she was given, supposedly containing her mother’s ashes,” RFA noted. “And a resident of Hongshan district said he had found the remains of ceramic dental crown, denture or implant in the urn labeled with his father’s name, even though his father had never had such a thing fitted.”

U.S. intelligence officials don’t think the pandemic was caused by deliberate wrongdoing. The outbreak that has now swept the world instead began with a simpler story, albeit one with tragic consequences: The prime suspect is “natural” transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.

“Good science, bad safety” is how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) put this theory in a Feb. 16 tweet. He ranked such a breach (or natural transmission) as more likely than two extreme possibilities: an accidental leak of an “engineered bioweapon” or a “deliberate release.” Cotton’s earlier loose talk about bioweapons set off a furor, back when he first raised it in late January and called the outbreak “worse than Chernobyl.”

President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added to the story last month by describing the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus,” respectively.

China dished wild, irresponsible allegations of its own. On March 12, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao charged in a tweet: “It might be [the] US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” He retweeted an article that claimed, without evidence, that U.S. troops might have spread the virus when they attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.

China retreated on March 22, when Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai told “Axios on HBO” that such rumors were “crazy” on both sides. A State Department spokesman said Cui’s comment was “welcome,” and Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged in a March 27 phone call to “focus on cooperative behavior,” a senior administration official told me.

To be clear: U.S. intelligence officials think there’s no evidence whatsoever that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory as a potential bioweapon. Solid scientific research demonstrates that the virus wasn’t engineered by humans and that it originated in bats.

But how did the outbreak occur? Solving this medical mystery is important to prevent future pandemics. What’s increasingly clear is that the initial “origin story” — that the virus was spread by people who ate contaminated animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan — is shaky.

Scientists have identified the culprit as a bat coronavirus, through genetic sequencing; bats weren’t sold at the seafood market, although that market or others could have sold animals that had contact with bats. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the seafood market.

There’s a competing theory — of an accidental lab release of bat coronavirus — that scientists have been puzzling about for weeks. Less than 300 yards from the seafood market is the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers from that facility and the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology have posted articles about collecting bat coronaviruses from around China, for study to prevent future illness. Did one of those samples leak, or was hazardous waste deposited in a place where it could spread?

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me in an email that “the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident,” with the virus passing from bat to human, possibly through another animal. But Ebright cautioned that it “also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.” He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, “which provides only minimal protection,” compared with the top BSL-4.

Ebright described a December video from the Wuhan CDC that shows staffers “collecting bat coronaviruses with inadequate [personal protective equipment] and unsafe operational practices.” Separately, I reviewed two Chinese articles, from 2017 and 2019, describing the actions of Wuhan CDC researcher Tian Junhua, who while capturing bats in a cave “forgot to take protective measures” so that “bat urine dripped from the top of his head like raindrops.”

And then there’s the Chinese study that was curiously withdrawn. In February, a site called ResearchGate published a brief article by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao from Guangzhou’s South China University of Technology. “In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories,” the article concluded. Botao Xiao told the Wall Street Journal in February that he had withdrawn the paper because it “was not supported by direct proofs.”

The seven funeral homes serving Wuhan have reportedly been running nonstop recently, prompting one resident to say “anyone with any ability to think” knows officials are lying about the death toll.

China announced 2,535 deaths in Wuhan – the initial epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic – which was locked down for two months.

But some locals believe the number is closer to 50,000.

News website Caixin.com reported that 5,000 urns had been delivered by a supplier to the Hankou Funeral Home in just one day.

“It can’t be right … because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?” a Wuhan resident surnamed Zhang told Radio Free Asia.

A resident surnamed Gao said the city’s seven crematoriums should have a capacity of around 2,000 bodies a day if they work around the clock.“Anyone looking at that figure will realise, anyone with any ability to think,” Gao said. “What are they talking about [2,535] people?”

“Seven crematoriums could get through more than that [in a single day].”

Some people estimate 46,800 COVID-19 victims will have been cremated, based on the capacity of the funeral homes.

Buying silence

Residents say city officials have been buying their silence with 3,000 yuan ($685) cash handouts in “funeral allowances” to make sure cremations are completed by the grave-tending festival of Qing Ming on April 5.

“It’s to stop them keening [a traditional expression of grief]; nobody’s allowed to keen after Qing Ming has passed,” Wuhan local Chen Yaohui said.

Another resident, Hu Aizhen, lost his mother to COVID-19 and said nobody in the city believes the official death toll.

“The official number of deaths was 2,500 people … but before the epidemic began, the city’s crematoriums typically cremated around 220 people a day,” Aizhen said.

“But during the epidemic, they transferred cremation workers from around China to Wuhan keep cremating bodies around the clock.”

Stamping out second wave

Mainland China has reported a drop in new coronavirus cases for the fourth consecutive day as Beijing seeks to stamp out the risk of a second wave of infections by shutting its borders to foreign travellers and cutting international flights.

The National Health Commission said on Monday that 31 new coronavirus cases were recorded on Sunday, including one locally transmitted infection, dropping from 45 cases a day earlier.

Four new deaths were reported, taking the cumulative, reported death toll in the mainland to 3304, from 81,470 infections.

The number of new infections has fallen sharply in the mainland from the peak in February.

Reopen for business

The government is now exhorting businesses and factories to reopen for business as it rolls out various stimulus to drive a recovery from what many now expect to be an outright economic contraction in January-March.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said the government would adjust support policies for small and medium-sized firms promptly as the situation developed to protect them from the impact of the coronavirus.

Chinese firms should actively resume operations and production even as coronavirus prevention efforts continue, Xi also said during a Sunday visit to Ningbo, a major port city in eastern Zhejiang province, according to state media.

No new Hubei cases

Hubei province, where the coronavirus outbreak first emerged in late 2019, “reported” no new cases for the sixth consecutive day on Sunday after the province of 60 million people lifted its traffic restrictions and resumed some domestic flights.

Beijing remains worried about the risk of a second wave of the epidemic triggered by cases involving travellers coming to China who were infected overseas.

The virus has now spread globally, infecting hundreds of thousands outside China’s borders.

China has barred foreigners from entering the country and ordered airlines to slash the number of international flights into the country.

The vast majority of the so-called imported cases reported to date have been Chinese nationals, many of whom are students.

As families in the central Chinese city began picking up the cremated ashes of those who have died from the virus this week, photos began circulating on social media and local media outlets showing vast numbers of urns at Wuhan funeral homes.

China has reported 3,299 coronavirus-related deaths, with most taking place in Wuhan, the epicenter of the global pandemic. But one funeral home received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days, according to the Chinese media outlet Caixin.

It’s not clear how many of the urns were filled.

Workers at several funeral parlors declined to provide any details to Bloomberg as to how many urns were waiting to be collected, saying they either did not know or were not authorized to share the number.

The photos surfaced after both the United States and Italy have reported significantly more cases and than China. Italy has reported just shy of three times the fatalities.

The regional health official in Wuhan City, the epicenter of the pandemic, demanded the destruction of the lab samples, which established the cause of an unexplained viral pneumonia since January 1, 2020. China didn’t acknowledge that there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.

Caixin Global provides the clearest evidence yet of the scale of this fatal cover-up in the very crucial early weeks, when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak — a contagion that spread throughout the world thereafter, and has caused a global shutdown, literally.

Warfare Beyond Rules

It is only apposite to go back and trace the many notable military research writings that have advocated for more than two decades that China should prepare itself to wage warfare beyond rules put in place by the Western powers.

In 1996, two Chinese military officers (colonels in the People’s Liberation Air Force (PLAAF), Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, took part in military exercises conducted by China for the purpose of coercing the island nation of Taiwan. This was the period when Taipei was getting ready for its presidential elections. Soon enough, East Asia witnessed the return of great power rivalry to the region when the United States dispatched two aircraft carrier groups to the area.

This became the backdrop in which these two colonels met in a small town in southeastern China’s Fujian province and began their research. The end product was a co-authored book, Chao Xian Zhan: Dui Quanqiu Hua Shidai Zhanzheng yu Zhanfa de Xiangding (Warfare Beyond Rules: Judgment of War and Methods of War in the Era of Globalization), published by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Art Press.

The central premise of Warfare Beyond Rules is that China should be prepared to conduct “warfare beyond all boundaries and limitations to defend itself.”

In the book, Qiao and Wang argue that the existing rules of war, international laws, and agreements were developed by the Western powers, and that the United States leads the race in new-age military technologies and weapon platforms. Writing more than two decades ago, Qiao and Wang stated that, because of higher costs, cutting-edge weapons’ platforms could trigger a national economic collapse.

A Revolution in Warfare By All Means

The book — termed Unrestricted Warfare in the English translated version — went on to state that geographical security is an outdated concept. Threats to national security may not come from cross-border invasion, but from non-military actions. Qiao and Wang articulated that definitions of security must include geographical, political, economic, resource, religious, cultural, data, environmental, and near-earth space security.

While commenting on the bans on chemical, biological weapons, and landmines, the authors argued that for a country to accept rules which regulate war depends on whether the laws and rules are favorable to its own national interests. They contended that powerful nations use the rules to control others, for instance “by banning chemical and biological weapons.”

The essence drawn out from these arguments is that China should freely decide and opt for the means of warfighting by disregarding agreements and codes of conduct developed over the past decades by the West. Basically, in theory, the book Warfare Beyond Rules highlights thinking out of the box.

Most significantly, with an aim to target the adversary’s vulnerable targets in unexpected ways, Warfare Beyond Rules underlined the concepts of “asymmetric warfare.” This included guerrilla war, terrorist actions, and cyber-attacks against data networks.

Qiao and Wang called for a “revolution in war,” which combines conventional with non-war actions, and military with non-military actions. In an alarming opinion, they stated that war may include a blend of stealth planes and cruise missiles, along with biochemical, financial, and terrorist attacks.

War for Biological Dominance

More than a decade later, a 2010 publication titled War for Biological Dominance (制生权战争) emphasized the impact of biology on future warfare.

The book, published by Xinhua Publishing House in October 2010, was authored by Guo Jiwei (郭继卫), a professor and chief physician at the Third Military Medical University, Army University. The book highlighted the decline of traditional military thinking and focused upon emerging trends in military thinking, the invisible battlefield, and unexpected changes.

Subsequently, in 2015, then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences He Fuchu (贺福初) argued in an essay that biotechnology would assume the shape of a new strategic commanding height in national defense. These will range from biomaterials to “brain control” weapons.

He Fuchu went on to become the vice president of the PLA’s Academy of Military Sciences the highest-level research institute of the PLA, headquartered in Beijing.

Chinese writings over the past two decades have amplified that cross integration of biotechnology, engineering, and information technology will become the new strategic doctrine for future military revolutions, as cited in the October 2015 edition of the Liberation Army Daily. These writings consistently put forth that weaponization of living organisms shall become a reality in the future, with non-traditional combat styles taking center stage.

Biology Among the 7 New Domains of Warfare

Foremost among the new-age defense high frontiers will be the biological frontier. Biodiversity and technology innovation will redefine biological military revolution. Since 2016, China’s Central Military Commission has been funding projects on military brain science, advanced bio-mimetic systems (that mimic biological systems), biological and biomimetic materials, and new-age biotechnology.

Further and more significantly, biology has been demarcated as “one of the seven new domains of warfare” in a 2017 book titled New Highland of War (National Defense University Press) authored by Zhang Shibo. Zhang is a retired general and former president of China’s National Defense University. In the book, Zhang argues that modern biotechnological development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability, including the possibility of employing “specific ethnic genetic attacks”.

More recently, the 2017 edition of Science of Military Strategy an authoritative textbook published by the PLA’s National Defense University — has introduced a new section on “biology as a domain of military struggle.” This section discusses new potential kinds of biological warfare, including “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”

Contemporary advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering hold worrying implications for military affairs. The Chinese military’s interest in these gets reflected through its strategic writings and research, which consistently have argued that advances in biology are contributing to changing the form or character (形态) of conflict.

China’s 13th Five-Year Plan

China’s national strategy of military-civil fusion (军民融合) has highlighted biology as a priority. As a result, as per the September 2017 Thirteenth Five-Year Special Plan for Military-Civilian Integration Development, the Party Central Committee, the State Council, and the Central Military Commission have put in motion the full implementation of the development strategy of military-civilian integration in the field of science and technology. This was done in accordance with the 13th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China.

Among the key tasks of this 2017 plan are the implementation of key technology-military-civilian integration projects.

In accordance with the requirements of the key national research and development (R&D) plan for the design of the entire chain and implementation of integrated organizations, a number of deployments have been made. These include the fields of biology, among others, with dual-use features to accelerate the formation of new productivity and combat effectiveness in scientific and technological achievements.

The plan also aims to strengthen the capability of military and civilian science and technology collaborative innovation and coordinate the layout of basic research and cutting-edge technology research. Accordingly, a special fund for basic research military-civilian integration has been set up to focus on supporting basic national defense research projects and promote the transformation of the results of basic civil research into military applications — more specifically, in the fields of biological crossover and disruptive technologies.

Study of the Chinese military’s interest in biology as an emerging domain of warfare becomes increasingly relevant in the current COVID-19 context, particularly when viewed against the two-decade-old backdrop of emphasis on biological frontiers of warfare put forth by Chinese military thinkers.

It is well-established that Chinese military strategists have been arguing about potential “genetic weapons” and the possibility of a “bloodless victory.” The task becomes all the more challenging, owing to the lack of transparency and uncertainty of ethics in China’s research activities.

Thus, the research writings cited above defend China’s move, if it were to come to that, of not hesitating to use as many means of warfare as possible. Clearly, those include weapons that are “not permitted by international law and the rules of war,” such as chemical and biological weapons.

The dangerous recommendations of most of these writings raise alarm bells about China’s future commitment on banning chemical and biological weapons.

The global pandemic is just one in a series of irritants that has rocked the relationship between Washington and Beijing since the Trump administration began to step up long-simmering confrontations on issues ranging from territory to trade to high-tech telecommunications.

COVID-19, however, has exposed an even deeper rift, one that widened yet again on Tuesday when China announced the expulsion of a number of American journalists. THe move underscored the growing mutual mistrust and hostility between the world’s two largest economies.

Since the virus has spread, President Donald Trump and his top aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have stepped up their criticism of China, noting consistently that the outbreak was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. They have referred to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus” or the “Chinese virus” on multiple occasions, disregarding World Health Organization terminology that avoids identifying the virus by geography.

On Tuesday alone, Trump discussed the Chinese source of virus outbreak during at least two events and denied there was any stigma attached to the label.

Yet, at a State Department news conference, Pompeo referred six times to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus” and suggested the Chinese are attempting to distract the world from the shortcomings of its initial response by highlighting its tough measures that have helped contain the outbreak. Pompeo also suggested that an “after action” report would corroborate his claim, indicating that the tensions are unlikely to end when the pandemic is over.

Experts are not unsympathetic to that position.

“They made some blunderous mistakes in the early six or seven weeks, and then they came down hard with a gargantuan quarantine,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“And they now control the narrative that this has been hugely successful and they suppress whatever additional dissident thoughts there may be on exactly what’s going on,” he told reporters in a conference call.

In a meeting with hotel executives at the White House, Trump took pains to make clear that the virus originated in China, asking pointed questions of Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson about where the impact was first felt.

“And this all started in China? That’s where you first saw the problem and where you first got hit?” Trump asked.

“Absolutely,” Sorenson replied.

“Hopefully, you all heard that,” Trump told reporters.

Pompeo has led a worldwide campaign to try to stop countries from allowing the Chinese high-tech giant Huawei to get access to next-generation wireless networks and repeatedly warned about the dangers of Chinese investment. On Tuesday, he spoke of a “special responsibility” that China had shirked when it discovered the virus outbreak in Wuhan.

“We know that the first government to be aware of the Wuhan virus was the Chinese government,” Pompeo told reporters. “That imposes a special responsibility, to raise the flag to say: ‘We have a problem, this is different and unique and present risks.’ And it took an awful long time for the world to become aware of this risk, that was sitting there, residing inside of China.”

Having already been targeted by Trump in a trade war and by Pompeo and others for repression of Muslim and other religious and ethnic minorities in western Xinjiang Province, the Chinese have taken particular offense to the constant repetition, complaining vociferously and suggesting that the U.S. military may have actually introduced the virus to Wuhan.

“Recently, some American politicians have linked the new coronavirus with China to stigmatize China. We express strong indignation and opposition to it,” foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Tuesday. “We urge the U.S. to immediately correct its mistakes and stop unwarranted accusations against China.”

That, in turn, has prompted angry U.S. protests with the State Department hauling in China’s ambassador to the United States to complain and Pompeo calling the top Chinese diplomat to re-register the anger.

“The disinformation campaign that they are waging is designed to shift responsibility,” Pompeo said, before quickly adding that “now is not the time for recriminations.”

Yet recriminations seem to be the order of the day.

“China was putting out information which was false — that our military gave this to them,” Trump said. “That was false. And rather than having an argument I said I have to call it where it came from. It did come from China. So I think it’s a very accurate term. But no, I didn’t appreciate the fact that China was saying that our military gave it to them.”

Shortly after Trump’s comments, the Chinese foreign ministry announced the expulsion of American reporters from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. China said the move was a reciprocal response to the Trump administration’s designation of five Chinese media outlets as foreign missions and restricting the number of Chinese who could work for them.

China described its steps as “necessary and reciprocal countermeasures that China is compelled to take in response to the unreasonable oppression the Chinese media organizations experience in the U.S.”

Pompeo rejected that.

“I regret China’s decision today to further foreclose the world’s ability to conduct free press operations that frankly, would be really good, really good for the Chinese people in these incredibly challenging global times. Where more information, more transparency are what will save lives. This is unfortunate,” he said. “I hope they will reconsider.”

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover. In mainland China, where the virus first exploded, more than 81,000 people have been diagnosed and more than 69,000 have recovered.

All you need to do is look at the images and words of brave citizens in Wuhan who have responded by passing on firsthand information about the epidemic to their compatriots and the outside world. They are doing this at great risk to themselves. They know they potentially face reprisal for the heroic act of simply sharing the truth.

Videos shot by brave locals over the past weekend — especially by the citizen journalists Fang Bing and Chen Qiushi — are revealing. Bodies lie in the street or are being carried out of homes. A van holding eight body bags waits to transport the dead from the hospital to a crematorium. Lines of people snake through hospital wards awaiting testing and registration, each cough in the crowd eliciting an unconscious flinch. Dozens of others sit in a waiting room, hooked up to IV bags dangling incongruously from the ceiling like jellyfish floating in an aquarium.

We hear the sobs of people standing over dying parents and loved ones lying lifeless on gurneys. People lean against the walls or lie in hallways, the dead lying on stretchers beside them covered with flowered comforters brought from home. Health-care workers all wear full hazmat suits, while regular people move in and out of hospitals protected only by paper face masks, all hiding behind a muffled anonymity. An eerie silence pervades, as though speech itself will spread the disease further.

You don’t have to look far to find the signs of a typically authoritarian response to the crisis. CCP officials have actually been welding doors shut to prevent those who have fallen ill from leaving their homes. Hospitals and clinics turn people away because they can’t pay (despite official promises of free care), returning home to attend to themselves and their families or to succumb to the illness alone. And without approved diagnoses, these deaths will not be counted in official CCP statistics about the new disease.

A virtual state of emergency holds across the country. Security forces have blocked village entryways. Guards stationed at checkpoints verify the health status of residents before they’re allowed to enter. Often, residents themselves are not permitted to leave the area; even the most remote places are not exempt. How people can survive is anyone’s guess.

Medical supplies, including protective clothing and masks, are in short supply. Reports describe how donations to the Red Cross in Wuhan were not distributed, while officials funneled off what they chose for their own benefit. The lockdown is ratcheting up the price for goods. A pack of 10 face masks, for instance, typically sells for around 3.7 yuan (about 50 cents). Now, a single mask costs 30 yuan (more than $4). In the southern city of Guangzhou, masks are only available by lottery.

The CCP has made a huge fuss over its construction in 10 days of a new hospital aimed at combating the virus (promising 1,000 new beds after well over 20,000 people have been reported infected). Yet the building has been described by some as resembling a prison, with slits in the doors, locks only on the outside and bars on the windows. This sort of project is typical of the regime, which desperately needs to show that it can act in response to a fast-moving and invisible threat. The government is already bringing foreign journalists to the hospital to show it off. Locals see it simply as a new facility for current patients already lucky enough to have a spot in a hospital.

For the 70-plus years of its power, the CCP has perfected the art of grand sweeping gestures aimed at demonstrating both its control of the population and a superficial sense of solidarity. In some ways, therefore, the party’s handling of the Wuhan virus exemplifies its tendency to produce huge, self-aggrandizing projects that have little positive impact on the ground. Barricading Wuhan after 5 million residents have already left and building hospitals in record time, while sending people home for lack of funds, fit this pattern all too well.

I have long said the Chinese Communist Party is a threat to humanity. Now, with the outbreak spreading from Wuhan to the far reaches of the globe, the regime has again proved itself a danger to civilization. It has succeeded in turning a public health crisis into a human rights catastrophe. The first victims are always the Chinese people themselves, but the rest of the world will pay a price for the CCP’s habits as well. For those who are hoping to live in a civilized world, this epidemic has shown that while authoritarianism remains, humanity will not live in peace.

Patients who came down with disease at the end of December all had connections to the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan China. The complex of stalls selling live fish, meat and wild animals is known in the region as a “wet market.” Researchers believe the new virus probably mutated from a coronavirus common in animals and jumped over to humans in the Wuhan bazaar.

I visited the Tai Po wet market in Hong Kong, and it’s quite obvious why the term “wet” is used. Live fish in open tubs splash water all over the floor. The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted right in front of the customers’ eyes. Live turtles and crustaceans climb over each other in boxes. Melting ice adds to the slush on the floor. There’s lots of water, blood, fish scales and chicken guts. Things are wet.

At the Tai Po market, a woman who runs a shellfish stall — she only wants to give her name as Mrs. Wong — says people blame wet markets for spreading disease. But she says that’s not fair. Like just about everyone else in the market. Wong is wearing a surgical face mask because of the coronavirus outbreak. She’s heard about the links between the wet market in Wuhan, China, and the coronavirus but doesn’t think something like that would happen in Hong Kong.

“It’s much cleaner in the Hong Kong markets. It’s so different from what’s happening in mainland China,” she says. “When I go to mainland China and I’m trying to eat something, I’m concerned about what’s in the food.”

Meanwhile, this kind of market is not just an Asian phenomenon. There are similar markets all over the world — places where fish, poultry and other animals are slaughtered and butchered right on the premises.

But researchers of zoonotic diseases — diseases that jump from animals to humans – pinpoint the wet markets in mainland China as particularly problematic for several reasons. First, these markets often have many different kinds of animals – some wild, some domesticated but not necessarily native to that part of Asia.

The stress of captivity in these chaotic markets weakens the animals’ immune systems and creates an environment where viruses from different species can mingle, swap bits of their genetic code and spread from one species to another, according to biologist Kevin Olival, vice president for research at the EcoHealth Alliance. When that happens, occasionally a new strain of an animal virus gets a foothold in humans and an outbreak like this current coronavirus erupts.

The Tai Po market in Hong Kong does have some live animals besides the seafood but the selection is rather boring compared to the exotic assortment of snakes, mammals and birds on offer in some markets in mainland China. They’re known to sell animals such as Himalayan palm civets, raccoon dogs, wild boars and cobras.

The only live birds in Tai Po are chickens, which are kept behind the butchered pork section of the market.

Chan Shu Chung has been selling chicken here for more than 10 years. He says business is really good right now because the price of pork — his main competition — is through the roof. Pork is in short supply due to trade tensions between China and the U.S. and a recent bout of swine flu.

So people are buying more chicken. Customers can select a live bird from Chung’s cages. Chung pulls them out by their feet, holds them upside down to show off their plump breasts. If the customer is happy with the bird, Chung puts a plastic tag with a number on the chicken’s foot. He gives the customer a matching tag, sort of like a coat check. Fifteen minutes later the shopper can come back and pick up the chicken meat.

Chung says he and his colleagues do their best to keep the area clean. They wash down the stalls regularly and disinfect the countertops to stop germs from spreading.

Chung, however, is one of the few people in the market who is not wearing a face mask. Face masks have become so common in Hong Kong since the coronavirus outbreak started that pharmacies across the city are sold out of them.

Chung says he isn’t afraid of this new coronavirus. He always gets his annual flu shot so he believes he’s protected against this new disease, even though scientists say the flu shot will not protect people against this new coronavirus.

Chung adds confidently that he’s even immune to SARS — for which there also is no commercially available vaccine.

But he does keep his chicken stalls incredibly clean, which public health officials say is one important step in stopping the spread of diseases. So maybe he’s onto something.