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

by David Quammen

The Malaysian government in the meantime had ordered a mass culling—that is, the extermination of every pig, infected or uninfected, on every farm that the outbreak had touched. Some of those piggeries had been abandoned by their operators, panicky and bewildered, even before the discovery of the new virus. People in certain areas even fled their homes; Sungai Nipah became a ghost town. By the end of the outbreak, at least 283 humans had been infected and 109 had died, for a case fatality rate of almost 40 percent. Nobody wanted to eat pork, or to handle it, or to buy it. Pigs were left starving in their pens. Some broke out to roam the roadways like feral dogs, foraging for food. Malaysia at that time contained 2.35 million pigs, half of them from Nipah-affected farms, so this could have become an almost medieval problem, like a scene from the Black Death: herds of infected pigs stampeding ravenously through empty villages. A phalanx of cullers, including soldiers from the army as well as police and veterinary officers, moved into the countryside wearing protective suits, gloves, masks, and goggles. Their assigned task was to shoot, bury, or otherwise dispose of more than a million animals, and to do it quickly, without splashing virus everywhere. Despite all precautions, at least half a dozen soldiers did get infected. Hume Field noted: “There’s no easy way to kill a million pigs.”

Taking care of Nipah