Coronavirus, Remember. Coronavirus diary, 2.

2. Huan bush market

Friday, March 17, 2020

Let us return to Wuhan, more precisely to the wholesale market of seafood and live animals of Huanan, a few blocks from Hankou station, 50,000 m2 with more than a thousand traders in a maze of stalls where the moods skinned animals rub shoulders with live animals and humans.

The diversity of dead and live “bush meat” on offer is impressive, squeezed into metal cages, baskets of bamboo and reeds, mammals, pig, camel, sheep, deer, kangaroo, rabbit, beaver, rat, pig- woodpecker, marmot, badger, otter, civet, dog, fox, wolf cubs, hedgehog, - birds, poultry, ostrich, peacock, pheasant, - reptiles, crocodile, turtles, snakes, - amphibians, frogs, giant salamander, - arthropods, cicada, scorpion, centipede!

This is where the ugly beast starts, from this promiscuous space where ancient culinary cultures and traditions dating back to the dawn of time are celebrated. We’re a long way from McDonald’s and KFC, empty chairs and disinfectant vegetables from the region of Almeria.

Sign of the times, sign of a planet where the same person can move from Paris to Melbourne in 24 hours, sign of a world where moving from one corner of the planet to another is a natural and necessary sport - which a supermarket employee will not have made his trip to Phuket, which butcher does his trekking in the Hymalaya, and which farmer does his visit to Angkor Watt? -, the first cases identified, duly listed, return stubbornly to Wuhan, January 13 in Thailand, January 15 in Japan, 22 in Taiwan, 23 in Singapore.

Until January 30, Wuhan is the mother of contagion, and the planet a dark planisphere on which the lights of contagion flare up.

Some spots are extraordinarily luminescent: These are cruise ships, slow-moving buildings gliding across the seas looking like floating Christmas trees at night - floating incubators, she says.

The Diamond Princess is one of them: 290 meters long, 36 wide, 62 high, 1337 cabins including 750 with balcony on the sea, 2674 passengers, 1238 crew. Built in Japan in 2002, it crosses in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. Everything is going for the best for the more than 2000 passengers and the staff, of more than 50 different nationalities, in this haven of consumerist modernity and luxury, whose leitmotif is "a cruise placed under the sign of relaxation, passengers will be able to relax thanks to massages with hot stones. " The water park, casino, pubs, bars, libraries, cinemas, nightclub are crowded. On January 28, the liner embarked its passengers at the port of Cai Lan, Vietnam, on January 31, it stopped at Keelung, Taiwan, on February 1 on the island of Okinawa, Japan. On January 3, he entered Tokyo Bay. He arrives at the port. But don't land ...