Points of origin

Two takes on Covid's early days-one aimed at academics, the other a 'documentary novel' that mixes fiction and fact to powerful effect

- Mark Honigsbaum

Before 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.

On 20 January, Dr Zhong Nanshan - the first person in China to have spoken out in 2003 about the threat posed by Sars - broke the news that the Wuhan virus - or Sars-CoV-2 as it was now known - was "certainly transmissible from human to human".

Three days later, China's president, Xi Jinping, instructed officials to lock down the city of 11 million people. The problem was clinicians had been warning of a new Sars-like illness since 27 December 2019 and by late January cases had already appeared in Thailand, Japan and Korea.