While animal origin of Covid-19 remains a mystery, will revised law in China help prevent more diseases jumping from wildlife to people?

Name: Trace, test, lock down, repeat: Three years under China’s zero-Covid strategy
Uploaded: 2023-01-25T22:00:11.000Z
Duration: 11 min 33 s
Description: Trace, test, lock down, repeat: Three years under China’s zero-Covid strategy

Revised Wildlife Protection Law will prohibit the consumption, hunting, transportation and sale of wild animals

But environmentalists say it is riddled with loopholes and will encourage commercial breeding of wildlife

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Echo Xie

Published: 6:00am, 26 Jan 2023Updated: 8:48am, 26 Jan 2023

About 10 million residents of Wuhan, where Covid-19 was first reported, endured a 76-day lockdown from January 2020 to contain the virus that causes the disease. Such responses became a key pillar of China’s zero-Covid policy, but another wave of infection hit the city three years later when the authorities pivoted to living with the virus. In the last of a three-part series on the anniversary of the lockdown, Echo Xie examines how the Wuhan outbreak led to changes in the law governing the trade in wild animals and whether they will help prevent future zoonotic diseases.

Three years ago, when early Covid-19 cases were linked to a wholesale seafood market in central China that also sold other live wild animals for consumption, the local authorities quickly shut it down.

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, is still closed, and some stallholders have moved to other markets in the city’s suburbs.

China fast-tracked a temporary ban on the sale of wild animals for consumption in early 2020, soon after Covid-19 emerged, and a revised Wildlife Protection Law is due to come into effect on May 1.

But some biologists and conservationists are concerned grey areas in the law could stimulate the illegal wildlife trade and increase the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks.

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Trace, test, lock down, repeat: Three years under China’s zero-Covid strategy

Tian Jiangming, a conservationist with the NGO Let Birds Fly who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, said he was worried the law would lead to a significant increase in people’s interactions with wild animals.

SCMP Series

Where now 3 years after Wuhan?

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