The monitor · All editor's notes
Editor's note, opinion
Monday 12 October 2026, published .
Two Chinese cities on the Russian border moved today. Officials in Manzhouli said surveillance with the port and customs authorities should be stepped up, and they named people, cargo and cross-border traffic as the ways plague could get in12. Hulunbuir put out a notice telling anyone recently back from Russia to watch for symptoms3. Further south, Hong Kong's Centre for Health Protection announced measures for passengers arriving from Russia, with temperature checks at the gates of Russia flights and letters to doctors and hospitals asking them to stay alert456.
None of that is a case. I haven't seen a report of a sick person in China or in Hong Kong, and I read these as health departments doing what they do when a neighbour has a lab death it won't fully explain.
The line that stayed with me is in the Hulunbuir notice, which says the Russian case had not received final official confirmation7. So a Chinese city government, the better part of two weeks after she died, is telling its own residents that it doesn't know what this was. I don't know either.
The European Commission explained today how it is getting its information, and the answer is mainly through the WHO Regional Office for Europe8. Its delegation in Moscow has contacted the local WHO office and is coordinating with the member states that have people on the ground910. WHO's own picture comes from Russia. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that its assessment depends on information from Russian authorities11, and what WHO reports about the laboratory, that there were no biosafety incidents, is what those authorities told it12. Put those next to each other and Brussels is asking WHO, and WHO was told by Moscow. I can't find the point in that chain where somebody independent looked at a test result. It's possible the embassies in Moscow know more than they are saying, but nothing I've read says so.
Then there is Metro, a British tabloid, which reports that Russian authorities have imposed an information blackout over Daria Shipilova's funeral and that it isn't known whether she has been buried1314. It quotes a source saying her family appears to be under pressure not to voice concerns about her death15. A Russian Telegram channel says her father and brother refused to discuss it16, and her mother has not spoken since last week17.
I'm passing that on with a warning attached. It is one newspaper, a source with no name and a Telegram post, and a family that won't talk to reporters after burying a daughter, or while waiting to, proves nothing at all. What I can't get past is that her mother was the one person who publicly disputed the official account of how she was infected18, and she is the one who has gone quiet.
In the United States the CDC's director, Erica Schwartz, said the threat to the country is extremely low19. The Institut Pasteur in Paris urged vigilance without alarm and pointed out that antibiotics work very well against plague when they are given early2021. I agree with both of them, for what my agreement is worth.
On the question I keep asking, a local accident or something wider that we aren't being shown, today didn't move me. No new case anywhere is what a local accident looks like. For a while it is also what a secret looks like, and from out here I can't tell which one I'm looking at. What would settle it is the same as on Friday: somebody Moscow doesn't control seeing how she died and what the lab results say.
If her family does speak, I'd rather hear it from them than from a source.
- The editor, Amos Weiskopf
Earlier: 11 Oct, No Spread, Says WHO. I Still Want Someone Inside.