A few days ago, Imelda Flattery’s tweet made me curious.
It’s two months to the day since BBC Beijing’s @StephenMcDonell filed the bureau’s first report on a mysterious new illness that had now killed two people in the Chinese city of Wuhan… Just two months ago. #coronavirus
— Imelda Flattery (@Imeldaflattery) March 17, 2020
I wanted to find this original report, possibly with the hope that finding it would give me a brief nostalgia rush, taking me back in time to what now, authentically, feels like a different era from the one we now inhabit.
After locating and defeating Twitter’s “Advanced Search” interface – not to mention a lot of vertical scrolling – I found what might be one of the earliest pieces of BBC reporting on the coronavirus.
Here’s the first tweet I could find from Stephen McDonell that explicitly references it. It’s part of a thread and I’ve included the first three here. You can read more on Twitter.
In #China a second death has been announced in #Wuhan from the new virus the authorities are racing to understand.
— Stephen McDonell (@StephenMcDonell) January 16, 2020
Millions of people in #China already on the move across the country and overseas for lunar new year. Now a second death from this new coronavirus which has also spread to #Japan as well as #Thailand. Those overseas had visited Wuhan. Still not that many cases reported.
— Stephen McDonell (@StephenMcDonell) January 16, 2020
Before people get too worried about this new virus cluster in Wuhan there are a few things to consider: there are only dozens of people ill; at least 12 have been discharged from hospital as they’ve now recovered; the 2nd man who died reportedly also had other medical problems…
— Stephen McDonell (@StephenMcDonell) January 17, 2020
Obviously it feels strange now to read the “let’s not worry too much” sections in this very early reporting, but it’s really unfair to be critical of it. Bear in mind the niche nature of the story as it was back then. If somebody in mid-January had published an accurate prediction of what the virus would do to the world, it would have come across as deranged, its author banished to the internet’s hinterlands.
As the virus unfolded in China and began to spread to other countries, though, we did accumulate enough data and information to make more accurate predictions about its impact. Some of that data can be understood by looking at these excellent charts from the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch:
Here are the latest death toll trajectories for major countries:
• More deaths in Italy today than in any country on any day, even as Italy’s curve starts bending below exponential 33% increase line
• Read more here about flattening curves in Asia: https://t.co/7A0ICnzEVm pic.twitter.com/VnhN9IrxZe
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 18, 2020
You can see from the second chart in particular that the UK had more deaths than Italy did at a similar stage in its infection curve. So this gives us an indication of the likely severity.
Despite this, there is still a bit of a “let’s not worry too much” theme here in the UK. Even as recently as a week ago prominent media figures were reacting with shock and disgust whenever an institution acted more cautiously than government guidance required:
Disappointing. Expected more courage, nerve & solidarity from @wellcometrust. Are you OK with throwing other scientific experts/advisors under the bus? Hoped you'd be leading fight for a) sound information, not doing facts as default anti-Toryism b) urgently researching antidote https://t.co/85989tiXEM
— Claire Fox (@Fox_Claire) March 13, 2020
What I find interesting about the above tweet is that the Wellcome Trust’s decision was being framed through the kaleidoscope of UK party politics – that it was somehow “anti-Tory” to take the decision that they took.
But it’s far from being the only example of this. Across the board, the UK’s political culture made it difficult to advise caution and take decisive steps without it being seen as an anti-government stance to take. It led to awkward contradictory messages such as the below:
People in the future who look back on this time might underestimate the degree to which ideology influenced the country’s virus response – they’d be unwise to do so, I think. There’s a lot to learn about how political factionalism can warp perceptions of reality and affect a society’s ability to make decisions in a rational way. Sometimes you do need to look clearly at other countries and learn from their mistakes.
Still trying to get my head round the fact there are people on Twitter seriously arguing the British government should be taking lessons in crisis management from the Italian state.
— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) March 9, 2020
The damage from this initial framing is still being felt. A lot of people read these opinion pieces when they were coming out and took the decision that they wouldn’t change their routines, that they’d keep socialising and working as usual, whether to “own the libs” or – perhaps more bizarrely – to “own the virus”, by denying it a moral victory.
She wasnt even that articulate. pic.twitter.com/VuQvBwCt1q
— Ger Z (@ger_z) March 19, 2020
(“I’m hardly changing at all, because if you do that then you give into it…”)
Normally, two months doesn’t seem like a long time. Stephen McDonell’s first BBC report on coronavirus didn’t come out all that long ago. But we’ve learnt so much about the coronavirus in that time, and it’s fair to say the world has changed profoundly. There’s no reason why we should still be hearing people say, “let’s not worry too much”.