BRUSSELS: EU leaders on Friday debated a giant post-coronavirus recovery plan as China raced to prevent a second wave that it said may have originally come from Europe.

The disease was meanwhile already present in Italy as far back as December, experts said, underscoring the difficulty of tracking and containing the pandemic.

But with the world trying to both limit the economic pain of Covid-19 even as it guards against a resurgence, top US expert Dr Anthony Fauci offered a ray of hope as he said he did not see America returning to fresh lockdown.

The disease has so far killed 450,000 people and infected 8.4 million people worldwide, as well as causing historic levels of economic disruption as countries and continents shut down to stop its spread.

Many European countries began reopening this month after painful lockdowns that devastated economies. Europe also remains the hardest-hit continent with over 190,000 deaths.

Facing the biggest recession in the EU’s history, leaders held a virtual summit on the European Commission’s proposal for a $840 billion rescue fund. The plan is seen as a key gesture of solidarity and unity for the troubled bloc.

But opposition is fierce from the “frugal four” — Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Austria — who have promised to fight to rein in spending.

On the other side are countries such as Italy and Spain that were the first and hardest hit by the pandemic, having already been crippled by overstretched finances. “It is clear that we expect no essential agreements at this summit,” said a German government official, with a French source describing it as “warm-up round”.

Leaders are instead likely to land a compromise in late July, as urged by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

China, where the disease first publicly emerged in December last year, has been cracking down on a fresh outbreak in the capital Beijing.

Authorities launched a nationwide campaign to inspect food imports after a cluster at a food market in Beijing.

The resurgence came after China had largely brought the virus under control and eased restrictions on movement inside the country.

Chinese authorities said studies of genome data, which it had shared with the World Health Organisation, suggest the new outbreak in Beijing “came from Europe”, but is different from what is currently spreading there.

“It is older than the virus currently circulating in Europe,” Zhang Yong of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

He raised the possibility of the virus lurking in imported frozen food or in the wholesale market itself, resulting in similarities to older strains.

Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2020