efore the World Health Organization had coined the term Covid-19, 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.
