Covid-19: What handling of the pandemic reveals about India and the world

Chinese officials are right to praise the response of the city and people of Wuhan itself

Nobody but dyed-in-the-wool, tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists believes that the novel coronavirus, which emerged from Wuhan at the end of last year, is anything but a natural evolution. (Scientists currently think that, while it may have evolved first in bats, it jumped first to another animal — perhaps a pangolin or a civet — and then to humans.) In spite of much uninformed and irresponsible speculation early on in the pandemic, the overwhelming weight of evidence is that it is natural. It certainly is not, on the basis of everything we know at the moment, a biological weapon gone rogue —