Why China will likely avoid liability in spread of coronavirus pandemic | TheHill

Joseph Stalin once said a single death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic. The observation was chilling because it has a grain of truth about how we process tragedies. The same is sometimes true legally. If a government kills one person, it is a murder. If it kills thousands of people, it is a policy. That cold fact soon may be evident in a growing number of class action lawsuits now brought against China over its failure to notify the world promptly of the coronavirus, along with renewed allegations that the outbreak may have started in a laboratory in Wuhan.

The question of Chinese responsibility, and of potential liability, became more acute this week. Many in the media have dismissed allegations of a release from the lab as a politically motivated conspiracy theory. It is the same narrative aggressively pushed by China. For some of us, however, the dismissal of the lab as the possible source always seemed willfully blind. It might not prove to be true, but it hardly seems a baseless idea since the lab was working on coronavirus research. We also know that China arrested and silenced people who tried to raise alarms.

via thehill.com