Out of two outlier countries comes early 21st century's history riding on the tails of dictatorial leaders' decision-making that transforms the world in hitherto-unimaginable ways. Who aside from the scientific community, could have lapsed even momentarily out of their comfort zone to think of a plague consuming the world body? And yet this is what happened when a coronavirus slipped from animal to humans, as another dread zoonotic that would take the toll of millions of human lives. 

Nature gone somewhat off course. Yet again, in the wake of other, historical plagues to focus humanity's collective mind on the vagaries of existence. And before the globe could see this pestilence receding, hard on its heels arrived another mass casualty of human-on-human relations defaulting to the forever-resuscitated condition of conflict.

Nature in her vast laboratory devised the unseen, silent dread of a virus whose sole purpose is to invade a living human body whose moist interior becomes the cradle of its countless offspring. A peculiarly offhanded method of ridding the world of humanity's excess baggage as the elderly fall away into the chasm of lonely death.

Nature, cruel in her indifference to all but the pleasure of creating new organisms and watching as they adapt, or fail to rescue themselves from the challenges of survival. Always, in some part of the world the sinister drama of evil stalking the land and reaping its victims, sharing them with a partner in desolation, the Angel of Death.

That is there. Here is peace and tranquility. Where in a civilized society far removed from the baggage of a long history of oppression and benighted discriminatory hatreds, people are permitted to get on with their lives as well as they can manage. Today,for us, dawned bright and beautiful. We only know of the deadly carnage wreaking havoc a world away when we pluck our daily newspapers up from the porch and unfold them over breakfast.

In our world, the sun is shining, eye-blindingly illuminating the thick, heavy snow that fell overnight. Whereas people in Kyiv have been blinded as the sky lights up from the explosions of artillery shells and bombs. There, people huddle fearfully in bomb shelters. Here, a warm and comfortable home shelters us from the winter cold, but the landscape is such that we make our plans to venture out-of-doors in anticipation of entering a forest,delightful recreated as a magical kingdom of snow-frosted beauty.

Just a Few Questions We'd Like Answered, Beijing...?

This aerial view shows the P4 laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on May 27, 2020. Photo by Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Even though the World Health Organization sent an investigative team to Wuhan, China, to look into allegations that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 might have been initiated as the result of a viral 'escape' from research being carried on at one of two laboratories in the city, the investigative team reached no conclusion. Their intention was to interview the Chinese scientists at the laboratory, and to visit both the high-security (P4) laboratory and the wild food market that the laboratory insisted was the source of the outbreak.

The WHO team was never permitted any independence, always accompanied by both Chinese authorities and members of the high-security laboratory. Their findings were 'guided' by Chinese authorities who strenuously denied any possibility that the virus could have escaped from the laboratory confines. This, though it was known and reported by visiting scientists that conditions at the laboratory were not as strictly controlled as they should be for such a high-security laboratory working with deadly bacterium and coronaviruses.

Beijing has been criticized from day one for its lapse in immediately notifying the WHO that a new virus was wreaking havoc on Wuhan. Initial reports played down the serious nature of a strange new type of pneumonia arising in Wuhan hospitals that was not responding to usual treatment, and causing deaths. Soon enough the world became aware of a young eye doctor who alerted his colleagues through social media of a peculiar and dangerous new virus, and who was brought before authorities for 'spreading false news'. He contracted COVID himself and died of it.

Now The Wall Street Journal has revealed that three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been taken to hospital as a result of symptoms now familiarly associated with serious bouts of COVID-19, a full month before the authorities in Beijing alerted the world of the presence of a new and extremely disturbing virus that had somehow leaped the species barrier from animals to humans. Beijing is well known to have kept possession of critical, sensitive information  the investigators were interested in studying.

What swiftly took place since December of 2019 across the globe as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the world is well enough known; a coronavirus pandemic we're still struggling with over a year-and-a-half on. But with the misfortune of the global pandemic came a ray of light, as soon afterward highly effective vaccines emerged out of other laboratories to throw a lifeline to humanity. 

 

Once China had got its outbreaks under control after screaming 'racism!' when it was offended that closed-border recommendations took effect, it focused on producing a number of vaccines. While denying it was responsible for the global outbreak of a dangerous new zoonotic, Beijing saw an opportunity to ingratiate itself to the world, as the manufacturer of anti-COVID vaccines which it would generously share with an ailing world. 

Although China was the first country out of the starting  gate with its vaccines, it has never produced a vaccine with a high efficacy rate. Its four different vaccines which it has trialed in a number of countries facing desperately high COVID-19 rates, like Brazil,  have been anything but successful, with an average efficacy rate hovering around 50 percent, as compared to the leading Western vaccines with rates of 85 to 95 percent efficacy.

The world deserves answers to some of its questions. China's reaction to a situation which impacted the entire world was first and foremost to protect its reputation. Any responsible government must recognize that in a situation of this magnitude that would swiftly affect the global community, it would have an obligation to act swiftly and decisively. Beijing chose not to. The long-suffering people of China deserve better from its suffocating government.

In this March 14, 2020 file photo, health officials inspect bats to be confiscated and culled in the wake of coronavirus outbreak at a live animal market in Solo, Central Java, Indonesia. The WHO on Tuesday urged countries to suspend the sale of live animals captured from the wild in food markets as an emergency measure, saying wild animals are a leading source of emerging infectious diseases like the coronavirus. (AP Photo, File)

We are bombarded with constant updates on the novel coronovirus as it storms its way across the globe. Those countries which have not yet been touched by the outbreak of the global pandemic have good reason to be apprehensive, for more join the ranks of the affected nations each day. It begins with one individual diagnosed with the dread COVID-19 who had travelled abroad where the virus has affected many, bringing that nasty souvenir home with them.

Ironically, while China advises the outside world that the number of cases have dwindled markedly there, Chinese travellers who had gone abroad for the Chinese New Year, some undoubtedly taking the virus with them, have returned bringing back with them the virus acquired in Europe, Australia, the United States and elsewhere. And the returning vacationers have as well initiated a second phase of the virus in Singapore and Hong Kong whose immediate clamp-down on their population had succeeded in minimizing contact and contagion.

Of course, it's difficult to really credit anything that comes out of official China when they claim to have conquered the virus that they will not have referred to as Wuhan coronavirus, claiming that to be racist, though the virus emerged there, as a result of cultural dining habits which themselves have done much to radically reduce the numbers of endangered wildlife. China, after all, instead of putting a preventive clamp on the virus to control it, denied at first that there was any such viral threat. The virus is nature's way of hitting back on presumptuously entitled humanity for thinking they could ravage nature's other creatures without consequences.

It's not too far a stretch to imagine that there are few people who go to bed at night feeling calm and relaxed. Most people would be haunted by the fear of contracting the coronavirus, and with good reason. The parlous situation in Italy is a case in point, where so many cases have developed that the health care system has come to the conclusion that there must be sacrifices for the greater good of the entire population, to conserve hospital space and equipment. That limited medical equipment and increasing numbers of medical personnel themselves falling victim must result in a decision not to admit the elderly and health-compromised -- the most vulnerable of all people -- to extensive care.

There are many people everywhere worldwide where hygiene required to help stave off the virus is not available and they will fall. Even in the developed world, where people in crowded living arrangements like apartment complexes make it difficult to maintain a social distance there will see dreadful fallout. Panic has long since set in among many people acting quite unreasonably allowing their fears to set aside their common sense, by stockpiling food, hygiene products and pharmaceuticals, taking far more than they need, and in the process leaving little for others.

The mental health declines in world populations desperate to evade the doom of oblivion in the face of a zoonotic coronavirus, variously referred to as the SARS novel coronavirus, will live long after science has somehow managed to quell the emergency. People are urged to self-isolate voluntarily for the good of society and for their own health, and feelings of fear, boredom and misery will take their toll, to be long remembered and inevitably affecting the psyches of much of the population worldwide.

We engaged in our own positive mental health option this afternoon, bowing both to routine and to necessity, by heading out to the ravine with Jackie and Jillie on a heavily overcast, 4C, windless day. The creek in the ravine is still running full with meltwater, and it will be increased this evening when overnight rain falls, as expected. The absence of bright, spring sun has slowed down the melt, but there are some areas adjacent the forest trails where we can already see snow-absent patches of mud and green revealing themselves on the forest floor.

The newly-revealed underlayers of snow and ice hold endless fascination for Jackie and Jillie, as new smells rise up and entice them to keep their scent-sensitive little noses down and sniffing wildly. That, and the embarrassment of riches they find in revealed twigs and branches offering chewing delights keeps them busy now on our outdoor ventures. It's much harder to make our way uphill now, since the thick layers of alternating ice and snow are becoming soft and slippery when it's mild like today and hard and icy on cooler days, so we trudge uphill and fall backward in a spring ritual that can be exhausting making our way up the many hills in the ravine.