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Around 1 a.m. on Dec. 31, Lu Junqing woke to a phone call from his boss at a local disinfection company. Get a team together and head to the Huanan market, he was told: “Bring your best kit.” Mr. Lu knew the market, a sprawling maze of stalls near a railway station, but had no clue it was the suspected source of a mysterious illness spreading across this city, later identified as Covid-19. When he got there, local officials directed him to a cluster of stalls selling wild animals for meat or traditional medicine. There were carcasses and caged live specimens, including snakes, dogs, rabbits and badgers, he said. (Page and Khan, 5/12)

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Internet has been teeming with provocative conspiracy theories that the novel coronavirus was (1) created in a Wuhan, China, lab and deployed as a bioweapon or (2) derived from bats, grown on tissue culture, intentionally or accidentally transmitted to a researcher, and released into the community. (Van Beusekom, 5/12)

Beijing resident Wang Yukun was happy to comply in April when the construction firm he works for told him he’d need to take a test for the novel coronavirus before he could come back to work, even though he was at low risk of having the disease. (Goh and Zhang, 5/13)

BMW workers take their own temperature three times a day and submit the results via an internal chat app. Foxconn, the electronics giant, tells employees to wash their hands before and after handling documents. A ride-share driver wipes down his car daily and sends video proof to headquarters. The world needs rules and guidelines for the post-coronavirus workplace, and China is the first laboratory. (Stevenson and Li, 5/12)