A British man travels from Britain to Singapore for a business conference, and then returns home shortly after, via France, where he stops for a few days for a skiing holiday. In today’s world, in the age of multi-national corporations and a burgeoning British middle class with expendable income for winter vacations, this story does not sound particularly unique or worthy of any special consideration. However, this is a record of the activity of Steven Walsh, a man connected to the spread of the coronavirus from Asia into Europe, infecting 11 people during his time in France.
We have spoken a few times in class about disease and its nature as a transnational ‘connector’, and it is evident that the current coronavirus, or COVID-19, epidemic will prove no exception in the historical record. Steven Walsh, as a transnational ‘actor’, contracted the disease from someone with a connection to Wuhan, China, was able to travel from Singapore to France, and then France to the UK, and his infection went undetected, due to a lack of displaying symptoms. However, his own detection of the illness, and confirmation by the NHS, raised a critical logistical issue for British authorities; to trace any contact Walsh had made between his time of infection in Singapore to the confirmation of his diagnosis in London, further complicated by his stop-over in France. Two transnational networks are born, exist and grow in tandem as a result of this outbreak: one of the infected ‘actors’, who are connected through their lines of infection, and the other of the ‘actors’ and ‘organisations’, who connect in their attempts to trace this first network across geographical boundaries.
Fortunately, it has since been reported that Walsh has made a full recovery and discharged from hospital, but his infection both hospitalised a further 11 people (and potentially more) and sparked a requirement for a significant search for any potential contacts he had made throughout his journey, and any contacts of those infected contacts, illustrating its continued impact past his recovery.
Zooming out, what stories such as that of Steven Walsh, and there will be many globally in the case of this virus, illustrate about the nature of the world today is two-fold. Firstly, it highlights the high volumes of people that travel in and out of, and around, China (somewhat exacerbated by Chinese New Year, a public holiday and thus a particularly popular time for travel). While creating many more cases of both aforementioned transnational networks, it primarily shows evidence of a increasingly globalised world. This growth in globalisation, and its product of such ease of access to, and popularity of, international travel, facilitates an additional dimension to the spread of viral infections in a way that many previous epidemics in history have not.
However, secondly, stories such as Walsh’s have undoubtedly contributed to the international response taken by many countries, firstly by the United States and followed by other countries such as Australia, to close borders to non-citizens who have visited China recently, contrary to the advice of the World Health Organisation. The ensuing debate between the political administrations of the United States and China about their respective responses to the situation, whether a lack of transparency or a lack of support and fear mongering, highlights the friction and fractures that exist within the constitutive elements of this globalised world.
Christian DeVito & Anne Gerritsen, in their introduction to Micro-Spatial Histories of Global Labour, suggest that ‘it is possible to overcome the binary division between global and local by combining micro-analysis with a spatially aware approach’ (p. 2). Indeed, this example shows how the details of one case study can reveal a great deal about the wider circumstances of the global network in which it takes place. While Tonio Andrade’s article gave an insight into the colonial and capitalist nature of 17th century Taiwan, the movement of this coronavirus, the ‘connector’, reveals much about the nature of our world today.