A Short Aide Memoire For The Next Four Years. The Covid Pandemic
For the full detailed timeline, please bookmark the updated Page 6 ~Timeline of The Covid PandemicWe’re about to be hit by another wave of “blame China” by the Trump administration and his allies for the devastating Covid pandemic. Part diversion from his own super-spreader actions, and part casus belli, sowing the seeds of fantastical demands for “reparations” to justify plundering the rising superpower, we need an overview of just what happened.
Among the narratives being circulated is RFK Jr’s assertion that the virus was designed to attack whites and blacks while leaving Chinese and Jews safe. If anything, Asian males are more vulnerable to the virus due to having a higher density of ACE2 receptors, the mechanism by which the virus enters the body. This has been known since at least April 2020. More publications containing the scientific evidence can easily be found with a simple search.
And Elon Musk has revived the lab creation theory in a cynical game of whack-a-mole.
The next pandemic is warming up to be Bird Flu, or H5N1 which has a 50 percent fatality for animals and humans. The US response has been as slack as with Covid after confirmation of the pandemic in 2020.
SARS 1, SARS-C0V-2 and Bird Flu are airborne. Be smart, wear a well fitting N95 or FFP2/3 respirator.
So, in the absence of any credible mainstream media investigation, lets remind ourselves of so many forgotten moments.
A Covid Timeline: 126 Things You Might Have Forgotten About The Pandemic
Timeline drawn from over 500 pages of notes. Compilation and analysis by Anna Chen, 19 February 2025January 2017: The outgoing Obama administration runs President Donald Trump’s incoming officials through the White House National Security Council (NSC) Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, otherwise known as the pandemic team.
31 May: The first of Trump’s Covfefe tweets appear 31.05.17
18 December 2017: Trump designates China a “strategic competitor”.
19 December 2017: In the middle of a flu pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announces it is restarting funding on Gain of Function, paused since October 2014 under Obama.
2017-18 flu season is bad. “The deadliest in a decade.”
22 March 2018: Trump appoints John Bolton as National Security Adviser, head of the National Security Council.
12 April 2018: John Bolton ousts Trump’s appointed head of the pandemic response team, Tom Bossert.
10 May 2018: NSA director John Bolton ousts another pandemic expert, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer. “This means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security.” Trump dissolves the White House NSC pandemic team with some surviving staff drawn into the newly formed Counterproliferation and Biodefense directorate under Bolton who claims he is merely “streamlining”. “After he became national security adviser, John Bolton eliminated the office as part of an NSC reorganisation, as he did not see global health issues as a national security priority.”
6 July 2018: Trump begins his trade war on China, destabilising a global economy just emerging in sync from America’s devastating Great Crash of 2008. He launches with an initial salvo of 25% tariff duty on around US$34 billion of imports from China, including cars, hard disks and aircraft parts. China doesn’t buckle. China retaliates with a 25% tariff on 545 US goods worth the same.
1 December 2018: Meng Wanzhou, Huawei chief financial officer and daughter of the company’s founder Ren Zhengfei, is arrested on a stopover in Canada on an extradition request from the US. Trump later announces he’ll intervene if he gets his trade deal with China. She isn’t freed for nearly three years, leaving Canada 24 September 2021.
January-August 2019: Crimson Contagion exercise: “A joint exercise conducted under the Trump administration from January to August 2019, in which numerous national, state and local, private and public organizations in the US participated, in order to test the capacity of the federal government and twelve states to respond to a severe pandemic of influenza originating in China.”
March 2019: The UK PPE emergency stockpile has fallen 40% since 2013, down £325m to £506m in March
4 March 2019: The US government approves resumption of Gain of Function creation of deadly human flu virus from Avian Flu. Scientists object and sound the alarm.
12 March 2019: The University of Barcelona in Spain announces (June 2020) that waste water collected 12 March 2019 contains traces of the novel coronavirus, nine months before Covid-19 is identified in China. * On the same day, only months after a joint naval exercise with China, and on the eve of a possible end of Trump’s trade war with a deal that sidelines European business interests, the EU echoes Washington’s definition of their trade partner as an economic competitor and systemic rival. The EU slams Italy for joining the Belt and Road Initiative, a trade route running across the length of the Europe Asia landmass and beyond. Having been bailed out by China after America’s devastating 2008 crash, the EU complains about China’s subsidised economy. French President Emmanuel Macron demands a coordinated, united approach to China.
23 March 2019: Italy becomes the first G7 European nation to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) signing up to a trade deal worth $2.9 billion. The US was always unlikely to accept this even though China’s ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, invites them to join BRI. Italy will be the European country hit hardest by Covid in 2019-20.
24 April 2019: China’s Belt and Road Initiative, begun 2013, has signed up 126 countries by 24th April, with trade volume surpassing $6T.
26 April 2019: Unhappy with China’s BRI milestone, China hawks grieve in their discontent. In May, the following month, a US delegation arrives in London and orders the UK rip out their Huawei 5G infrastructure, much of which has already been paid for. They shout at the GCHQ officials for five hours. Former British National Security Adviser and later, Ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch: “The encounter exposed that the US case was really political, not technical. So GCHQ stuck to their guns, and, initially, so did the prime minister. (Theresa May)'” Boris Johnson acquiesces in May the following year.
30 June 2019: Mysterious respiratory disease breaks out in the Greenspring Care Home, Fairfax county, Virginia USA, results in 54 illnesses, 18 hospitalisations and two deaths. The care home deaths are remarkably similar to Covid but are never explained.
Summer 2019: NED backs Hong Kong riots – China doesn’t buckle
July 2019: Having already disbanded the US pandemic team, Trump closes the CDC’s 47-strong Beijing office, recalling the last remaining CDC officer in July.
July 2019: In the UK, the new Prime Minister Boris Johnson abolishes the UK pandemic team in the same month as Trump shuts the US CDC’s Beijing office. Temporarily mothballed by former PM Theresa May (to focus on Brexit), the Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee (THRCC) was designed to ensure the UK was prepared for a pandemic.
19 July 2019: Fort Detrick’s army laboratory is closed by the CDC due to leaks.
August 2019: The first case of EVALI (e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury) is reported to the CDC in early August.
6 September 2019: Federal health officials announce five mysterious deaths linked to vaping: seven by 17 September. X-rays show the same glassification of lungs that will show up in Covid.
September 2019: Trump closes the PREDICT early warning programme designed to alert the government to potential pandemics only three months before first Covid cases are found in China.
9 October 2019: A strange lung disease in the military. “The U.S. Army has hospitalized two soldiers with severe lung damage linked to vaping, a cigarette alternative that is responsible for 18 deaths in a multi-state outbreak. As of October 1, roughly 1,000 lung injury cases associated with vaping have been reported to the CDC from 48 states and 1 U.S. territory.” Nowhere else in the world outside the US and the military experienced vaping deaths.
18 October 2019: The international Military Games are hosted in Wuhan. 300 American military servicemen and women take part. The same day sees the launch of Event 201 in New York, a table-top pandemic exercise.
24 October 2019: Five of the US military develop a fever and are taken to an infectious diseases hospital for treatment. The following February, the head of the Wuhan Jinyintan hospital where they were treated insists it was malaria, not the novel coronavirus. China is malaria-free.
4 November 2019: Trump posts another covfefe tweet. “How do you know it was a “mistweet?’ May be something with deeper meaning!”
November 2019: The Pentagon briefs Nato and Israel about the coming Pandemic. But doesn’t warn China.
17 November 2019: Trump’s non-routine visit to Walter Reed Hospital raises suspicions that the president received an early coronavirus shot.
21 November 2019: Evidence that the virus could have been circulating in the world prior to the first cases in China. In addition to the virus found in Barcelona sewage earlier in March, the SARS-CoV-2 sequence is found in Milan, Italy, in a four-year old boy “with no history of travelling” who falls ill in November 2019. The sample is taken 5 December and later identified, corroborating earlier waste-water samples. COVID-19 antibodies are found in nearly 12% of Italian 959 lung cancer screening blood samples drawn September 2019 to March 2020. Fourteen percent of the positives are from September. In Late November, viral RNA is found in wastewater in Brazil. In France, antibodies are found in serum samples collected in November, and viral RNA is detected in December “in a respiratory sample from a patient hospitalised for haemoptysis”. If Covid was present at this time or earlier, by the time it was discovered in China in December, it would have been all over the country, not just Hubei province.
22 November 2019: Fort Detrick prepares to reopen after two breaches of containment closed it earlier in the year. “In one instance, personnel deliberately propped open the door to the autoclave room while the employee removed biohazard waste.”
1 December 2019: First symptoms for COVID-19 found in Hubei in a 55 -year old man.
10 December 2019: Huanan seafood market’s Covid case zero in Wuhan. Wei Guixian, a seafood merchant, first feels ill. Earliest ascertained market case.
13 December 2019: 106 Covid antigen-positive readings were found in 7,389 American Red Cross blood samples taken across nine states in the US between 13 December 2019 and 17 January 2020 (tested 2021). This number of samples with SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies present indicates an initial infection around August 2019 and that it was already well established by December. Within this batch, reactive antibodies were found in samples from California, Oregon and Washington, 13-16 December 2019. Similarly, antibodies were found in samples from Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin in early January. There’s been no public investigation of samples taken earlier than December.
16 December 2019: Why would Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison depart for a mysterious holiday at a US military resort in Hawaii, right in the middle of the bushfire emergency? Cut to April 17 the following year.
18 December 2019: There’s enough of the virus circulating in Italy for waste water samples collected on the 18th December to allow the detection of viral RNA.
27 December 2019: In Wuhan, Zhang Jixian, the director of respiratory and critical care at Hubei Provincial Hospital, reports the viral pneumonia of unknown origin to Wuhan Hospital management the day after she notices four unusual cases in her unit. Over the next two days, the Chinese CDC is alerted. France gets its first case when a sample taken on the 27th from a fishmonger who has never travelled to China later tests positive for Covid (confirmed May 2020).
30 December 2019: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission alerts the city’s hospitals and institutions with instructions. Copies are leaked.
31 December 2019: The Wuhan MHC reports the unknown viral illness on its website. The news is picked up by the news agencies and the WHO.
1st January 2020: The head of China’s CDC, George Gao, speaks to the US CDC director, Robert Redfield, about the spread of a mysterious respiratory illness in Wuhan with a further phone call on the 8th. Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is shut down for disinfection and investigation, followed by bans on live animals from all wet markets, as well as the sale of wild animals to restaurants. In the US, 2020 is election year for Trump.
2 January 2020: Reports that this isn’t SARS 1 but is a “novel coronavirus”. Most of the 44 infected patients are men. We’ll later find out that the virus enters via ACE2 receptors and Asian males have the highest density of ACE2. 66% of patients were exposed to Huanan seafood market. The WHO in China offers support to the National Health Commission and requests further information. The WHO informs the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) about the cluster of cases in the PRC – GOARN partners include “major public health agencies, laboratories, sister UN agencies, international organizations and NGOs”. The Lancet reports on the cluster of 41 cases in Wuhan.
3 January 2020: A busy day. Chinese officials formally provide information to the WHO on the cluster of 44 cases of ‘viral pneumonia of unknown cause’ identified in Wuhan. Robert Redfield informs Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, about the new coronavirus in China. Azar tells the White House. Azar instructs his Chief of Staff to share the Chinese report with the National Security Council. Meanwhile, Dr Anthony Fauci warns CNN, “The current flu season is on track to be one of the worst in years,” as severe as the 2017-18 season which was “one of the worst in years, the deadliest in a decade.”. * In the UK, Health minister Matt Hancock is alerted to the outbreak, speaking to health officials on the 6th. Back in China, Professor Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre and School of Public Health, receives sample swabs from Wuhan and starts to map out the first complete genome of the strange pneumonia.
4 January 2020: Trump plays golf. Iranian Major General Qasem Suleimani is assassinated by a US attack drone at Baghdad international airport. Iran will be one of the first countries to be infected with Covid, its political elite hit especially hard from its first case on 19 February.
5 January 2020: Wuhan Municipal Health Commission gives briefing updates, reporting 59 cases. Lab tests rule out SARS, MERS and other known respiratory pathogens, indicating this is a new or “novel” coronavirus. China informs the WHO which then releases its first briefing on cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. It later emerges that, on 5th January, Professor Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai-led consortium, which includes China’s CDC, sequences the genome in 40 hours and uploads the genecode to the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), also giving it to Eddie Holmes. Trump plays golf.
6 January 2020: A China Level 2 emergency is declared by the National Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (China’s CDC).
7 January 2020: Chinese authorities announce the virus has been identified as a novel coronavirus, similar to the one associated with SARS and the middle east respiratory syndrome (MERS). It is initially named 2019-nCoV. At a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, general secretary Xi Jinping personally orders officials to control the outbreak.
9 January 2020. The first known deaths from Covid occur on the same day in the US and China. Lovell “Cookie” Brown becomes the first officially recorded death in America, only identified later. Later, five others Covid deaths are found to date from January raising questions about when it started. The CDC’s director, Robert Redfield, admits to Rep. Harley Rouda at the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing in March that they were misdiagnosing early Covid deaths as flu.
11 January 2020: The consortium, led by the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre and School of Public Health, had sequenced and deposited the complete genome code at the US NCIB on the 5th. On the 10/11th, Professor Zhang approves public release online by Eddie Holmes. The genome is deposited on GenBank on 10 January and released on the consortium’s behalf by Eddie Holmes on the 11th. The complete GENOME, submitted 5 January 2020. The WHO makes the announcement to the world.
13 January: China gets its Covid test. The Germans have theirs on the 16th. The US doesn’t get a test until early February and it doesn’t work. It takes until 15 March for 10K Americans to be tested. Later, there will be calls for CDC director Redfield to resign.
14 January 2020: The WHO’s press briefing states: “it is certainly possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission”. Their tweet reads: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China”.
15 January 2020: US markets close at an all-time high. Trump signs Phase One of a trade deal with China, declaring his 18-month old trade war a success. China agrees to buy an additional US$200 billion of American goods and services over the next two years. Tariffs are halved or suspended.
16 January 2020: Germany develops its own COVID-19 test. Russia will start producing its first tests on 24th January. Countries begin to ramp up their own tests. On 7 April, the WHO accepts two diagnostic tests for procurement.
17 January 2020: The Chinese CDC director George Gao and his team arrive in Wuhan to supervise the control and prevention efforts of the outbreak.* In the UK, a government document is published confirming that, delaying action in response to the Covid virus and abandoning the Precautionary Principle, officials breached their own scientific risk standards. * The US CDC sends 100 staff to three US airports to screen passengers for the virus.
18 January 2020: Beijing takes over responsibility for the pandemic from the Wuhan local government and sends in renowned Dr Zhong Nanshan to investigate. Wuhan’s Baibuting community go ahead with their Chinese New Year “Pot luck” banquet with 40,000 guests, gaining notoriety in China. The mayor later resigns under public pressure but insists that the spread was judged to be “limited between humans” at the time. * Saturday: Alex Azar calls Trump at Mar-a-Lago but is told by the president he is being alarmist.
19 January 2020: Gao and his team conclude that there was “‘very efficient’ human-to-human transmission ” The WHO tweets that “there is evidence of limited human-to-human transmission of nCOV.” Trump plays golf.
20 January 2020: A crucial date. Dr Zhong Nanshan confirms Covid human-to-human transmission after medics are infected and two patients unconnected to Wuhan are found in Guangdong. This confirms its airborne status. A total of 200 cases have been confirmed in China. China CDC reports: “Scientists from the China CDC identified three different strains of the 2019-nCoV, confirming that the original Wuhan coronavirus had mutated into two additional strains.” A WHO field team visits China. * In the US, the CDC develops a test but one of the three small sequence components proves inconclusive and the test fails, halting testing in February. Both the US and South Korea report their first confirmed cases of COVID-19.
21 January 2020: A Seattle man recently returned from Wuhan becomes the first officially known infection in the US. Originally thought to be a teenager on 24 February, when Dr Chu and her team conduct tests in Seattle without government approval in February, they discover that the coronavirus was already well established from at least mid-January. * In the UK, New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) scientists recommend the elevation of the UK risk warning from “very low” to “low”. Falling back on “herd immunity” assumptions, NERVTAG says tough measures would only delay the outbreak, not prevent it.
22 January 2020: Trump: “We have it under control … gonna be just fine.” * The UK’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) meets formally for the first time. So does Cabinet Office Briefing Room A (Cobra), chaired by Matt Hancock, the health secretary, and missed by Boris Johnson. Scientists observe Sage has a “shocking lack of expertise – no molecular virologists, immunologists or intensive care experts.” No-one sounds the Covid alarm: “the scientific committees that advised Johnson didn’t study, until mid-March, the option of the kind of stringent lockdown adopted early on in China.” SAGE’s John Edmunds says no-one thought it politically acceptable to shut the country down. Brits flying home to the UK from Wuhan are neither screened on arrival not contacted by government agencies.
Thursday 23 January 2020, 10am WUHAN LOCKDOWN BEGINS: Beijing locks down Wuhan, home to 11 million, followed by two other cities in Hubei province – Huanggang and Ezhou – in an unprecedented region-wide quarantine. All transport in and out of Wuhan is halted, followed by the others in lockdown. 15 other cities lock down the following day. WHO case numbers confirmed to date: 575 in China. The WHO warns the world to prepare for a global lockdown: “This outbreak was detected because China had put in place a system specifically to pick up severe lower respiratory infections. It was that system that caught this event.” * UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock updates Parliament. Risk level is set to “Low”.
24 January 2020: The first Covid deaths are reported in China which now has 830 confirmed cases (later discovered to be 9 January). Beijing sends to Hubei 346 national medical teams of 42,600 medical workers and more than 900 public health professionals. Details of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention diagnostic Covid tests are published at the WHO website. “By the end of March it had conducted well over 320,000 tests.” Stunningly, two hospitals are built in 10 days at Huoshenshan and Leishenshan. Daily production of N95 masks is increased from 6 million to over 205 million by the end of April. China’s vast scales of production enable it to supply itself and much of the world with PPE. * In the US, the Washington Times accuses the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) lab of creating COVID-19, a week after the US-funded Radio Free Asia starts the ball rolling – no-one produces any evidence. Cases are now showing up in the US, UK and across Asia.
25 January 2020 CHINESE NEW YEAR: The next day, more China hawks including Steve Bannon and Tom Cotton accuse China of creating the virus in a lab. Two days after China’s unprecedented region-wide lockdown, Brits who flew home to the UK from Wuhan just before the lockdown have still not been screened on arrival not contacted by government agencies.
26 January 2020: In another attack in the Washington Times, “Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare, said the institute is linked to Beijing’s covert bio-weapons program.”
28 January: President Donald Trump is briefed on the seriousness of the pandemic by his NSA. He orders evacuation of the American consulate in Wuhan by 747 plane, hundreds of passengers likely carrying the virus. But despite being informed how deadly the coronavirus is – including that it is airborne – he persists in playing it down, calls it a hoax, undermines the science and holds unmasked superspreader rallies for nearly two months. Carl Bernstein says he has no moral compass. CDC Director Robert Redfield gives cover, telling state public health directors that “the virus is not spreading in the U.S. at this time and CDC believes the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is low.” Redfield will later deflect from his shortcomings by pushing the lab-leak “China did it” conspiracy.
29 January 2020: Columbia epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, dubbed a “virus hunter,” flies to Guangzhou at China’s invitation where he meets Zhong Nanshan. The following day they fly to Beijing. On Lipkin’s return to the US, he is extensively interviewed in the media. In February, the US CDC will send a “team of experts” to China as part of the WHO team to “look at the raw data”.
30 January 2020 GLOBAL EMERGENCY: The WHO finally declare coronavirus to be a globally Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). * Known global cases: 7,834. China: 7, 736 (plus 12,167 suspected). 98 cases in 18 other countries, 170 deaths. * US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Smith sees the economic advantage in a Covid industry and tells Fox News: “I think it will help accelerate the return of jobs to North America, some to the US. … the fact is, it does give businesses yet another thing to consider when they go through their review of their supply chain.” * UK Chief Medical Officers raise risk from “low” to “moderate”.
31 January 2020: The date Britain leaves the EU. Boris Johnson announces the Brexit departure in a speech but no mention of Covid. The UK declines to join a European scheme to source Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). A Tory clique wins the contracts for PPE, much of it not useable. * In the US, Trump bans flights from China three days after his calamitous evacuation of Wuhan. Alex Azar declares an emergency in the US. * Eighty-three Britons are evacuated from Wuhan and land at RAF Brize Norton, UK. * In Italy, two cases of Covid are confirmed nearly three months after a swab taken from a four-year old boy in Milan on 5 December has proved positive when tested.
February: The US is officially in recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, having expanded since June 2009 after China floated the global economy out of America’s Great Crash, 2008. Remember, this is election year.
1 & 2 February 2020: Trump plays golf.
3 February 2020: In PM Boris Johnson’s “Superman” speech, he dismisses the Covid emergency. He observes that Trump is “letting the air out of the tyres of the world economy,” and is unsparing in his criticism of Washington’s trade war with Beijing. An angry phone call from Trump comes a few days later …
4 February 2020: Chris Whitty briefs Boris Johnson who tells him he is “overreacting”. The UK Foreign Office tells 30,000 British nationals in China to return home. There are no screening facilities or information leaflets at the airports. * On the ocean, the British registered Diamond Princess is the first cruise ship to be stricken with Covid: over 700 are infected and 12 people die. * The US CDC decides to manufacture Covid tests and distribute them under the FDA to state public health laboratories but doesn’t tell commercial labs to begin manufacturing. All non-CDC tests were effectively banned until late February. (Read the whole thread!)
5 February 2020: After 13 days, China’s Covid cases peak. They will reach zero by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown. * The US CDC begins tests but botches it. “While other countries have been able to run millions of tests, the CDC has tested only 1,235 patients.” The CDC labs are described as “filthy” and “contaminated“.
7 February 2020: US public health laboratories finally begin to receive the CDC’s kits but they are found to be not working due to contamination. * Trump phones Boris Johnson and takes out his frustrations on him. He rages at Johnson for not ripping out £billions of Huawei 5G infrastructure we’ve already paid for as ordered by his envoys during his and Theresa May’s tenure as prime minister. Johnson acquiesces in June after Trump bans Huawei from using US-made chips.
8 February 2020: A Shanghai press conference confirms the virus is airborne.
10 February 2020: Trump: “It will go away in April.” Despite the Covid test fiasco, the president submits a budget proposal seeking a $693.3 million reduction in funding for the CDC, or about a 9 percent cut.
11 February 2020: The virus is officially named “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” (SARS‑CoV‑2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. * A WHO press conference announces the disease is officially named COVID-19. The WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reverses his classification of Covid as airborne to droplets when cued by Mike Ryan, but refuses to blame China for Covid. In November 2020, Tedros’s Ethiopia homeland has its first civil war outbreak for 20 years. Trump will pull the US out of the WHO at the start of his second term in January 2025.
12 February 2020: Boris Johnson misses 4th Cobra meeting.
13 February 2020: US politicians dump their stocks a week before the Covid market crash “Black Swan” event. * In the UK, Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock fail to dial in to a conference call with EU leaders and health ministers to discuss coronavirus response. Over the next six weeks they will fail to attend a further seven such calls. * In China: Beijing sacks Communist Party heads in Hubei over ‘botched’ outbreak response in provincial capital of Wuhan.
14 February 2020: France announces first Covid death in Europe. * China reports 5090 new cases, 63,851 in total. Good news from Chinese scientists that antibodies in recovered patients can kill the virus. * After CMO Chris Whitty reassures Downing Street that there is no sustained transmission outside Wuhan, Boris Johnson goes on holiday for ten days at Chevening, reminiscent of Australian PM Scott Morrison taking a holiday at a US military resort on Hawaii before Christmas during the bushfire emergency. (Johnson took a New Year holiday in the Caribbean.) “Complete government breakdown”
15 February 2020: 760 million people are in lockdown in China. The western press gloats shamefully, no compassion or empathy, unwilling to learn lessons, not understanding what’s headed their way. China’s 76-day sacrifice will end up eradicating the virus only to be overwhelmed by variants stewed up abroad and forced to abandon Zero Covid measures two years later.
18 February 2020: UK care workers denied PPE when an NHS briefing states it “should not be needed” when dealing with Covid-19 patients who would be isolated.
19 February 2020: First confirmed case in Iran which becomes the world’s second epicentre.
20 February 2020: Stock market crash begins. Drops 30% by 23 March, the biggest fall being on the 16th. Ends 7 April when investors can reload at rock bottom prices.
21 February 2020: NERVTAG approves “moderate” risk assessment. Estimates 1.3 million dead but recommends no action.
24 February 2020: Routine contact tracing in the UK is halted. General testing will stop on 12 March. Health Secretary Matt Hancock sets up a new Test and Trace agency in May under his horse racing associate, Dido Harding. Total cost will amount to £37 billion.
26 February 2020: “Trump: Within a couple of days it’ll be close to zero.” The president replaces Alex Azar with Mike Pence over the testing debacle.
27 February: Trump: “One day, like a miracle, it will disappear.” US Covid testing restarts.
28 February: Trump: “Coronavirus is the Democrats’ new hoax.”
2 March 2020: PM Boris Johnson chairs his first Cobra meeting.
5 March: The US gets its Covid tests. Unfortunately, they don’t work.
6 March: “Anybody can get tests. They’re perfect”
9 March 2020: Italy extends lockdown from northern regions to entire country.
10-13 March 2020: 60,000 people attend the UK Cheltenham Race Festival every day. Local Gloucestershire hospitals end up with double the recorded deaths of nearby Trusts Bristol, Swindon and Bath. Dido Harding sits on the Cheltenham Festival board and is a Jockey Club director. On 7 May, she will be made head of Britain’s abysmal Track and Trace, costing billions, and made a life peer as a baroness. UK Chief Science Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance defends not banning the Cheltenham gathering: “The most likely place you are going to get an infection from is a family member, a friend, someone very close in a small space, not in the big space.”
11 March 2020: The US bans flights from Europe, except the UK, for 30 days. At the House Oversight and Reform Committee on 11 and 12 March, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC director Robert Redfield give testimony on the pandemic. One key issue is the test kit debacle. Redfield admits to Rep Harley Rouda that they have been misdiagnosing early Covid cases as flu. Rouda: “We could have people in the United States dying from what appears to be influenza when it could be the coronavirus?” Redfield: Some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”
12 March 2020: With 590 known cases of Covid in the UK and rising, the government stops Track and Trace, defended by Chris Whitty, who says no social distancing measures will be introduced. The Lancet calls this “playing roulette with the public.” * 50K fans cram into Afield Stadium to watch Liverpool play Atletico Madrid. Lewis Capaldi performs for 12K fans armed only with bottles of hand sanitiser. Boris Johnson holds a press conference after a Cobra meeting, telling people to stay at home for 7 days if they feel ill. Thinking of banning large events but won’t close schools. Patrick Vallance then pushes “herd immunity” line: “it is not possible to stop everyone getting it. And it is not desirable either, he says. He says you want people to pick up immunity.” * China argues back: see “How the Wolf Warrior was invented”.
13 March 2020 TRUMP’S U-TURN: President Donald Trump U-turns on Covid and declares a national emergency, adding, “I don’t take responsibility at all”. * In the UK, the Government Chief Science Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, says 60% of the population must be infected with Covid in order to achieve “herd immunity”. UK IPC downgrades Covid from airborne to droplets.
14 March 2020: Spain goes into lockdown. In China Shenzhen closes. * The WHO’s Margaret Harris questions the UK’s decision to pursue “herd immunity”.
15 March 2020: The US begins staggered, limited shutdowns starting with the New York City public schools system. California follows with a state-wide stay-at-home order four days later on 19 March. Trump plays golf.
16 March 2020: Trump: “Our response is a ten.” * Canada goes into lockdown. * UK Professor Neil Ferguson publishes a study showing that doing nothing will lead to over 500,000 deaths in Britain.
17 March 2020: France begins lockdown. * In the UK, “the chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, wrote to hospital chiefs, telling them to ‘urgently discharge’ patients to help free up 15,000 beds for the expected first wave of hospital admissions.” It’s not until 15 April that Matt Hancock announces plans to test all patients before entering care homes. Boris Johnson blames care homes. Dominic Cummings blames Matt Hancock.
19 March 2020: China reports zero new cases of Covid for the first time. * PM Boris Johnson tells Chancellor Rishi Sunak: “We’re killing the patient to tackle the tumour… Why are we destroying the economy for people who will die soon anyway”.
20 March 2020: The White House sends a blame China cable to state department officials. * The UK closes schools from today.
23 March 2020 UK LOCKDOWN: The UK finally locks down for the first time, to 10 May. * The US stock market crash bottoms out.
25 March 2020: Trump: “We’ve done one helluva job.” India locks down. * In China, the Hubei lockdown is lifted, leaving Wuhan as the last to open.
27 March 2020: A Chinese team of medics and equipment fly into London to share their knowledge and help our pandemic efforts. Their boxes are marked with the Chinese flag and Union Jack and carry the promise: ‘We will get through this together!’ They are ignored.
28 March 2020: Trump extends social distancing measures to 28 April. The official US death toll stands at 2,000, having doubled in two days. * In the UK, The Lancet is scathingly critical: ‘The UK Government’s Contain–Delay–Mitigate–Research strategy failed. It failed, in part, because ministers didn’t follow WHO’s advice to “test, test, test” every suspected case. They didn’t isolate and quarantine. They didn’t contact trace. These basic principles of public health and infectious disease control were ignored, for reasons that remain opaque.” * The WHO mysteriously and wrongly claims Covid is not airborne. It retracts the claim a day later, and is criticised 3rd April by aerosol scientists.
31 March 2020: Mike Pompeo tells Americans abroad to fly home “immediately”. US domestic flights continue.
2 April 2020 UK CARE HOME SCANDAL: UK government publishes Care Home guidance requiring testing only from hospitals, not the community. Health secretary Matt Hancock had previously ignored Chris Whitty’s advice to test “all going into care homes”, blaming shortage of tests, resulting in mass infection and many deaths. “… as ministers rushed to free up 25,000 hospital beds amid fears the NHS could be overwhelmed confirmed that ‘negative tests are not required prior to transfers/admissions into the care home’”. * In China, Shenzhen bans the eating of cats and dogs as part of a wider clampdown on consuming wildlife.
3 April 2020: At a White House briefing, the CDC recommends wearing masks outside the home.
5 April 2020: PM Boris Johnson is hospitalised with Covid.
7 April 2020 midnight WUHAN LOCKDOWN ENDS: China ends the unprecedented Wuhan lockdown at 76 days having eradicated the virus by day 43 – the last in China. From now on there will only be outbreaks to firefight on a smaller scale until variants stewed up abroad overwhelm their Zero Covid strategy two years later. In total, 25 cities locked down, containing 101,602,895 people with 4,632 deaths and over 82,000 cases according to the National Health Commission. * US CDC Robert Redfield downplays Covid: death toll will be “much lower” than the projection of 100K-240K.
9 April 2020: Free antigen tests are made available in England.
15 April 2020: Official US death toll reaches 25,000.
17 April 2020: The 57-page “blame China” memo is published by State Secretary Mike Pompeo’s Republican allies. On the same day, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and Foreign Minister Marise Payne divert blame onto China and start calls for an inquiry. The blame-game is taken up by politicians and media in the West and sucks all the energy out of public health efforts to eradicated the virus.
20 April 2020: Eighty UK healthcare workers are dead with no proper PPE in sight. * The WHO director confirms only a low number of Covid case have developed antibodies meaning herd immunity isn’t happening. * The FT acknowledges China is staging an economic recovery.
22 April 2020: Six weeks after abandoning contact tracing, the UK government announces it is to resume in May.
27 April 2020: The Trump administration continues to confiscate PPE from countries and blue states, hijacking 5 millions masks from veterans’ hospitals. Trump demands reparations from China for Covid fallout in Opium Wars 2.
10 May 2020: Boris Johnson announces plans to end lockdown just as we are nearing zero Covid. Critics say the UK closed too late and opened too early.
28 May 2020: The UK launches its Test and Trace service under businesswoman and a director of The Jockey Club and Cheltenham racecourse, Dido Harding, appointed by Matt Hancock on 7 May. Hancock is a Cheltenham regular and trained as a jockey. It fails to find a quarter of cases and isn’t fully operational until 4 June, after lockdown ends. Called an “absolute shambles,” “flying blind”. Costs £37 billion over two years with little to show for it. * US Covid deaths exceed 100,000.
20 June – 22 September 2020: Trump holds 18 campaign rallies – unmasked – resulting in an estimated 30,000 extra cases and a possible 700 deaths, according to Stanford research. ““The worst part is that this doesn’t even capture Trump’s many superspreader events on White House grounds or the last five weeks of events across the country.”
23 September 2020: Letter from former director of the CDC, Bill Foege, to current director Robert Redfield is damning of Redfield’s performance and urges him to resign. “1) Despite the White House spin attempts, this will go down as a colossal failure of the public health system of this country. The biggest challenge in a century and we let the country down. The public health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic. 2) The cause will be the incompetence and illogic of the White House program. 3) The White House has had no hesitation to blame and disgrace CDC, you and the State.”
1 October 2020: Trump tests positive for Covid, days after attending unmasked events at the White House and a presidential debate with Joe Biden.
4 October 2020: “Herd immunity” is formalised by the Koch-funded Great Barrington Declaration, opposed by most of the science community. It is impossible to achieve herd immunity (we are not cattle) when a virus mutates so fast.
19 September 2024: Cell paper identifies Wuhan seafood market as animal spillover to human site. Persuasive argument for natural cause but still doesn’t explain the earlier evidence of the virus in US (Red Cross blood samples) and in sewage in Italy and Spain.
Further Reading
The Covid Pandemic, Page 1: How coronavirus was weaponised – natural disaster, man-made calamity
The Covid Pandemic, Page 2: Sir Patrick Vallance’s Sky News “herd immunity” interview, 13 March 2020. Full transcipt.
The Covid Pandemic, Page 3: How “herd immunity” won and changed humanity’s health forever. Public Health vs Big Business conflict.
The Covid Pandemic, Page 4: Medical journals and videos on damage to the brain and immunity system by SARS-CoV-2
The Covid Pandemic, Page 5: I caught Covid again and it’s not getting any better. Covid Inquiry: denial of Airborne vs Droplets mode of transmission prolonged the pandemic
The Covid Pandemic, Page 6: (This page) Covid Timeline vs Trump spin – 110 dates to remember
Anna Chen - political and cultural analysis of US-China relations
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