Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

by David Quammen

SARS in 2003 was an outbreak, not a global pandemic. Eight thousand cases are relatively few, for such an explosive infection; 774 people died, not 7 million. Several factors contributed to limiting the scope and the impact of the outbreak, of which humanity’s good luck was only one. Another was the speed and excellence of the laboratory diagnostics—finding the virus and identifying it—performed by Malik Peiris, Guan Yi, their partners in Hong Kong, and their colleagues and competitors in the United States, China, and Europe. Still another was the brisk efficiency with which cases were isolated, contacts were traced, and quarantine measures were instituted in southern China (after some early confusion and denial), Hong Kong, Singapore, Hanoi, and Toronto; and the rigor of infection-control efforts within hospitals, such as those overseen by Brenda Ang at Tan Tock Seng. If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city—more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions—it might have escaped containment and burned through a much larger segment of humanity. One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills—maybe even the cough—precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to...

Why SARS didn't become a pandemic