The Novel Coronavirus has claimed more than 58,000 lives and infected over one million people globally. Since the outbreak in China's Wuhan in December 2019 several celebrities, politicians and well-known personalities revealed that the deadly Coronavirus has affected them.
While this list includes names like UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Iran's Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's adviser Seyed Mohammad Mir-Mohammadi, who died due to the COVID-19, as of now there is no news of China's politicians being affected by the virus which triggered allegations against the Asian country.
Coronavirus outbreak in China
China has been facing accusation for not being transparent with the world regarding the virus outbreak in Hubei's Wuhan city. The authorities were also criticized for silencing Coronavirus whistleblower late Li Wenliang and another doctor Ai Fen who tried to alert people after they found similar pneumonia-like cases in the region.
China informed the World Health organization three weeks later Wuhan hospital doctors started noticing the COVID-19 outbreak. Wuhan Municipal Health Commission also continued to claim for months that their investigation has not found "any obvious human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infection."
Meanwhile, thousands of people in China started to fall ill due to the COVID-19 disease and on January 13 the first case of Coronavirus outside China was reported. It was a 61-year-old woman from Thailand who had returned from Wuhan. On January 21, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the first case of the coronavirus in the US.
The outbreak affected politicians
While the outbreak emerged in China, but it was Europe became the epicentre with the highest death toll. Currently, the US tops the list of most Coronavirus infected cases as it reported 278,458 infection cases, followed by Italy (119,827), Spain (119,199), Germany (91,159) and France (83,029).
Top politicians, such as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, British Health Secretary Matt Hancock, MP Nadine Dorries were tested positive and several other world figures such as Australia's Home Minister, Spain's Prime Minister's wife as well as Britain's Prince Charles were affected by the Coronavirus.
But the surprising fact is even though Wuhan is close to Beijing and Shanghai, neither these cities including the business areas nor the Communist Party leaders were devastated by the virus outbreak. There is no single report on China's political leader or CCP member being affected by the Novel Coronavirus.
The world and China
While China decided to lift the lockdown measures despite WHO's warning for triggering new epidemic, the virus has ruined the world economy, left thousands of people jobless globally and forced millions of people to stay at home due to lockdown in many countries, in which India is the largest.
Major economic and political centres of the world Paris, New York, Berlin, Roam and Delhi are closed but China's Beijing and Shanghai are open. Beijing, the capital of China is the city where the CCP leaders and military officials live. Despite the fact that Beijing is only over 1,000 km (Approximately 12 hours) away from Wuhan, the city is not locked down.
The other city, Shanghai is the financial centre of China and most of the high profile businessmen, who keep the industry running, live in the city. Shanghai is also around 800 km away from Wuhan but the city did not suffer by the Coronavirus outbreak. It is absolutely possible that these major cities have followed stricter safety measures to safeguard the residents when the authorities came to know about the Coronavirus outbreak and that is why none of the high-profile residents of Beijing and Shanghai became infected by the disease.
Shocking revelation about Coronavirus outbreak
Even though it is a fact that China has transparency issues, at least in terms of alerting people about the new Coronavirus initially- the authorities tried to cover things up, the CCP led Asian country is also different from North Korea, which has not revealed any details about their Coronavirus cases till now. It should be noted that the Chinese authority released detail reports on the genetic sequence of the virus to help the researchers find a cure.
However, recently a seven-minute-long Chinese documentary film on Wuhan Coronavirus was posted online. The film featured a researcher Tian Junhua at Wuhan's Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who has visited dozens of caves in China's Hubei province to capture bats and take research samples from the mammals that have been identified as one of the main carriers of the deadly coronavirus. Even, Wuhan Institute of Virology in China posted a job opening on November 18 last year "asking for scientists to come to research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats."
Even though earlier it was revealed by the scientists that the Novel Coronavirus is a naturally evolved virus, not a product created inside a laboratory, these new revelations have triggered a wild conspiracy theory that the pandemic could be a man-made crisis.
If we look at the current global crisis, all the top countries have been suffering to contain the spread of the COVID-19 as the infection and death numbers are rising every day, but not for China. The authorities claimed that even though they have noticed a surge in symptom-free and imported Coronavirus cases, the all-over condition is under control. At this point of time German health minister Jens Spahn mentioned that due to the surge in global demand, sourcing agents from various countries are "competing" to snap up masks made in China, which also reflects a surge in global demand for masks.
