A Hypothesis On How the Coronavirus Spread

Wenzhou

@moldbugman tweets:

I have a little theory about where to focus on during this Coronavirus pandemic. I’m no expert, but everything I know is telling me to watch the Chinese city of Wenzhou not Wuhan.
8:37 AM · Feb 24, 2020·Twitter for iPhone
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Feb 24
Wuhan is a landlocked city, until relatively recently it wasn’t even classified as “one” city (it’s an amalgamation of three smaller cities). It has no great diaspora like Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Chaozhou, etc. It’s a place where migrant workers go to, not leave.
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Feb 24
When Northern Italy reported such a severe number of cases my thoughts immediately turned to Wenzhou - a port city 800km east of Wuhan and the origin of 90% of Italy’s Chinese community.
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Feb 24
I knew this firsthand having spoken to a lot of European Chinese and knowing the background of their demographics. Wenzhounese have a canny reputation for two things: making money and their ability to craft fashionable clothing; especially shoes and bags.
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Feb 24
Partly because of this reputation, Wenzhounese are so dominant in northern Italy. The vast majority of Italian leather shoes and bags are actually made by Chinese factories in Lombardy and Venato run by established Wenzhounese Italians who import illegal labour from Wenzhou.
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Feb 24
When I read that the Coronavirus spread in Venato from a “bar” my immediate suspicion was that this was lazy journalism. I can’t prove it but I’d bet it was a Chinese karaoke bar rather than a true Venetian drinking hole.
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Feb 24
Wenzhou was the second Chinese city put on quarantine lockdown after Wuhan and has the highest number of cases of Coronavirus outside of Hubei. It is a more likely urban candidate to spread the virus globally rather than Wuhan.
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Feb 24
My suspicions are still whether or not this virus has truly spread outside the Chinese commmunity. Western media will deliberately obscure whether these “Italian” cases are truly native or not.
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Feb 24
If my suspicions are correct and the spread of the virus does have a Wenzhou connection, I would urge everyone to pay attention to France as the next outbreak. Again, a lot of Wenzhounese are employed in “French” fashion factories and most French-Chinese are from Wenzhou.
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Feb 24
Next up would be Spain where they make up 70% of Spanish-Chinese and then Holland. The US has far less Wenzhounese than Europe where they are mainly concentrated in New York City.

Feb 24
I could be dead wrong on this little hypothesis, but if

France is the next European hotspot after Italy I really think I could be onto something. Stay safe frens and 保重.

And this also from  @moldbugman:

Since I posted this yesterday one thing has been bugging me. If my theory is true and Corona spread to Italy via Wenzhou (not Wuhan), then how do the large number of cases in Iran figure into all this? Then I realised...

I used to live in Zhejiang province where Wenzhou is located and I thought back to when I met Persians or Arabs. In every single case they were doing business in Yiwu - a town just 157 km from Wenzhou.

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Feb 24
Yiwu is the world’s largest wholesale market and caters more towards Middle Eastern traders rather than the West. There are about 4,000 traders from North Africa and the Middle East who have settled down in Yiwu alone.

Feb 24
Yiwu is full of Arabic and Persian restaurants due to the high number of businessmen from the region.

-RW

(HT: @DangerGlen)