I don’t want to ruin the show Containment for you if you haven’t already binge-watched it on Netflix, but I’m going to do it anyway. The basic plot is that an Ebola-like virus breaks out in an Atlanta hospital, only it’s a lot more contagious than Ebola. The Centers for Disease Control take over and put a whole section of Atlanta surrounding the hospital in a hard quarantine. This involves building walls, sealing up manhole covers, and giving the national guard orders to shoot-to-kill anyone who tries to leave the cordon. Then the race is on to find some kind of treatment before the virus escapes into the rest of the country.

The kicker is that the virus originated in a CDC lab, which they obviously are trying to cover up. The release was unintentional, but once it happens the CDC treats the cordon as training for a genuine bioengineered attack.

I mention this because it’s possible that something quite like this is how we wound up with Covid-19 pandemic. Now, I say it’s possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. What we know is that the State Department was concerned that a lab in Wuhan, China was experimenting with bat-derived coronaviruses and that they wanted extra resources for two reasons. First, they thought the research was important because a bat coronavirus had already cause the SARS outbreak and the potential for another outbreak was real. Second, they didn’t feel like the lab was staffed adequately or was taking sufficient precautions.

In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help.

Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration did not act on this recommendation, so the research continued under less-than-ideal conditions. There’s also another lab in Wuhan that is a potential source of the outbreak:

There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved.

Now, it’s a pretty big coincidence that the Covid-19 outbreak began in the same city where these labs are located, so naturally people are suspicious. China has been anything but forthcoming about the origins of the virus, and some doctors and journalists who might have valuable information have actually disappeared.

The Covid-19 virus is made of a lot of little pieces, many of which serve to defeat the multiple levels of security our cells and immune system have for detecting and destroying viral infections. It’s quite possible to play around with viruses and make them more lethal and more transmissible by adding in some of these pieces. We actually have rules against doing this kind of research.

The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments.

On one level, it doesn’t really matter how the outbreak started. We have to deal with it either way, and the wisdom of the moratorium is now obvious even if the lack of one doesn’t explain the current pandemic. On the other hand, if irresponsible research is the culprit here, then those responsible should shoulder a lot of the burden for compensating the victims, which is all of us regardless of whether or not we get sick or die.

I know the Trump administration would love to prove that this is what happened so that they can distract from their own failures. But, even if this scenario, they share the blame for not taking the warnings seriously and not offering to help make the lab more secure.

I obviously don’t know what happened, but it wouldn’t shock me to learn that fiction anticipated reality in the reality show world that we’re living in.