He spent ten days in and around Phnom Penh and left feeling good about his new friends’ ability to work the gene machine. It was the flight home, on January 10, 2020, that he found unsettling. He changed planes again in Guangdong—the province from which the Chinese doctor, the superspreader of SARS, had come. The airport was transformed. There were now lots of security people wearing masks. Passengers were required to step, one by one, inside an acrylic stall and be scanned for fever. “They weren’t fooling around,” said Joe. “I thought, What the hell is going on?” He’d never seen a fever box
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