Wuhan: How the Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control; Wuhan: A Documentary Novel – reviews

Dali L Yang's critique of China's response in the early days of the Covid pandemic is thoroughgoing if academic, while poet Liao Yiwu's account mixes fact and fiction to extraordinary effect

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the beginning of the pandemic, before the World Health Organization had coined the term Covid-19. Back then, it was the Wuhan virus", a mysterious pathogen from a city that few people outside China had visited.

On 12 January 2020, China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the virus's genome on an international database, permitting scientists anywhere in the world to see that it was a coronavirus closely related to Sars - the pathogen that had caused a mini-pandemic in 2002-2004.