On December 31, 2019, Sui-Lee Wee, a reporter in The New York Times’ Beijing bureau, was at a children’s museum with her little ones when her phone started buzzing. She opened up a group chat in WhatsApp and saw an article, from a local newspaper about 720 miles away in the city of Wuhan, about a mystery illness that was circulating there. Wee sat down near a display of toy train tracks, in front of a gaggle of boisterous toddlers, trying to make sense of what she was reading. It was all rather vague, and since she was off from work for another few days, she didn’t probe too deeply. It wasn’t until early the following week that Wee intercepted a decidedly more ominous-sounding lead from a colleague in Hong Kong, where panic had begun to set in—people stocking up on masks, temperature checks, and so on. With the help of a researcher and another reporter from the bureau, Wee made a bunch of calls, talked to two people who had been sickened but were not severely ill, and then wrote the Times’ very first article about the disease now known as COVID-19. You could be forgiven for having missed it—the piece was buried on page 13 of the January 7 print edition. “My takeaway,” Wee recently recalled, “was, this is gonna be okay. Maybe this is just one of those weird illnesses that would pass. I even sent an email to my editors saying this is not gonna be a big deal.”
Today, you can’t open the Times’ mobile app or homepage without being bombarded with COVID content. Teams of journalists have been covering the pandemic almost nonstop for nearly 24 months. COVID is a frequent subject on episodes of The Daily, and the lead topic of the Times’ morning email briefing more than once a week. There’s a coronavirus live blog, a daily coronavirus newsletter, and all manner of interactive charts and maps that track cases, deaths, vaccinations, regional trends, and other data. And that’s just the Times. For a sense of COVID’s preternatural presence in our media diet, consider the velocity at which stories about the omicron variant took over the news cycle within 24 hours after the first push alerts went out on Thanksgiving.
As a media reporter, I’m as fascinated in some ways with COVID’s origins in the news ecosystem as I am with the origins of COVID itself. The difference is that one of these origins is knowable, a textual artifact that can be traced back to this same week exactly two years ago. At the time, the vast majority of the human race was ringing in the New Year, toasting happiness and hope and renewal. The coming storm was visible only to a select few, including those who wrote the first words ever to appear, on page or screen, about the virus we now called SARS-CoV-2. Reading these stories now feels eerily surreal, like revisiting the first major news story about the AIDS epidemic in 1981, when the Times’ Lawrence K. Altman reported on “a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer” in 41 gay men. One of Wee’s friends messaged her last year and told her to read Altman’s story if she hadn’t already. “It’s very similar,” she told me. “You start thinking, Wow, all these infectious diseases start the same way.”
Wee was early to the story about the mystery pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan, but she was hardly the first person to write about it. On the evening of December 30, 2019, Marjorie Pollack was with her husband at their vacation home on the East End of Long Island. They were relaxing after dinner when Pollack, a consulting epidemiologist and deputy editor of an email service published by the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED), got an email from a colleague in Taiwan. The colleague had flagged a Chinese social media post containing a photo of an alert allegedly issued by the health authorities in Wuhan. With the help of several ProMED colleagues and sources in Taiwan, Pollack immediately got to work trying to corroborate the document.
Before long, she’d found two Chinese-language articles syndicated on a Beijing-based media property called Sina Finance. One of these was from the China Business News, which had confirmed with the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission that the alert, an “urgent notice on the treatment of pneumonia of unknown cause,” was genuine, according to a Google translation. “It is understood that the first patient with unexplained pneumonia that appeared in Wuhan this time came from the Wuhan [Huanan] Seafood Market,” the article stated. “Patients with unexplained pneumonia have done a good job of isolation and treatment, which does not prevent other patients from going to the medical institution for medical treatment. Wuhan has the best virus research institution in the country, and the virus detection results will be released to the public as soon as they are found.”
The second article, billed as an exclusive, was from a daily newspaper called the 21st Century Business Herald. A reporter there named Chen Hongxia had visited the seafood market and observed that “the stall…where patients with unexplained pneumonia had been reported had been closed, the scene had been quarantined, and disease prevention and control and medical personnel were conducting prevention and treatment on the spot.” Chen snapped a photo of the empty stall and the Herald published it along with her story.
Pollack copy and pasted Google-translated text of both articles and added her own analysis: “Having been involved in moderating the SARS-CoV (severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus) and the MERS-CoV (Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome–coronavirus), the type of social media activity that is now surrounding this event is very reminiscent of the original ‘rumors’ that accompanied the SARS-CoV outbreak. The exception is the transparency of the local government in responding to this currently undiagnosed outbreak.” Just before midnight, she hit send on an email blast to ProMED’s tens of thousands of subscribers around the world. “The next several months was spent working 20 to 21 hours a day,” Pollack told me. “I was getting a maximum three hours sleep a night.”
While Pollack was putting together her ProMED report out on Long Island, Sharon Sanders was getting ready for bed at her home down in central Florida. Around 11:40 p.m., before turning in, she did one last check of the website she runs, FluTrackers. It’s the same routine every night, but this time, something caught Sanders’s eye. A user with family in Hong Kong had posted a link to an article from the city’s public broadcasting service, Radio Television Hong Kong, reporting that medical experts had arrived in Wuhan to investigate a suspected outbreak of acute respiratory disease. Sanders began scouring the internet and found several additional articles. One was a report from China’s People’s Daily. Another, published on Sina Finance, included a minute-long video that a reporter had filmed on a visit to the seafood market. Sanders posted the stories on FluTrackers and frantically alerted a colleague.
“I called Michael Coston who authors the Avian Flu Diary blog at that late hour because we have an agreement to call each other if a very significant item comes across our desk. In 14 years I have never called him late at night,” Sanders recalled for a project about the pandemic by two history professors at the University of Alabama. “What was significant about those media reports was their mere existence. Nothing gets through the China internet firewall unless the government approves. For a single outbreak of any disease involving 27 humans that was being widely broadcast meant something serious was going on.”
Over the next few days, news about the situation in Wuhan began trickling out to a wider audience in the English-language media. Britain’s Independent published an article at 2:57 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. The South China Morning Post had something by 4:59 p.m. on January 1. On January 4, the World Health Organization tweeted about the outbreak. That same day, regional newspapers around the U.S., from The Boston Globe to the Fort Collins Coloradoan to the Arizona Daily Star, carried an Associated Press story reporting that the “number of cases of a new type of viral pneumonia linked to a food market in central China has risen to 44.… The most common symptom was fever, with shortness of breath and lung infections appearing in a ‘small number’ of cases.… Thus far, there have been no clear indications of human-to-human transmission of the disease.”
It wasn’t until Wee’s January 6 article in the Times that the story gained a major national platform. But even then, it would be a slow burn until the word “coronavirus” caught fire in the media, as it did later that month and into the next. On January 8, Wee coauthored a story with Donald McNeil Jr., then a star health reporter at the Times, reporting that Chinese researchers had identified the new virus. That same week, some of the Times’ top editors from New York, including Joe Kahn, Michael Slackman, and Ellen Pollock, were in Hong Kong for the paper’s annual Asia all-hands meeting. The discovery of a novel coronavirus was big news, but it didn’t even register on the list of major themes that editors and reporters tossed out during the meeting as coverage targets for the coming year. “Everyone just moved on,” Wee recalled. “The main themes were climate change, demographics, gender. I had prepared a long list of ideas on demographics in China and social issues that I wanted to cover.”
