My Take | Why China is not responsible for pandemic
- Beijing bought time for the world with its draconian lockdown of the city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, but many countries, notably Britain and the United States, squandered it
In early February, The Wall Street Journal published the by-now infamous opinion piece titled “The real sick man of Asia”, by Walter Russell Mead, an international politics professor.
Mead knew as much about epidemiology as the next taxi driver. That may be why he thought, like many pundits at the time, that the global impact of the outbreak in China would be on the supply chains of international companies.
“The likeliest economic consequence of the coronavirus epidemic, forecasters expect, will be a short and sharp fall in Chinese economic growth rates during the first quarter, recovering as the disease fades,” he wrote.
“The most important longer-term outcome would appear to be a strengthening of a trend for global companies to “de-Sinicise” their supply chains.”
