Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb

The new virus had nearly 29,000 nucleotide bases that held its genetic instruction set, and it looked frighteningly similar to SARS-1, which killed nearly eight hundred people globally in 2002 and 2003. But the virus wasn’t SARS-1.19 It was something completely novel. That information alone should have been terrifying. A new respiratory virus capable of making people severely ill was spreading in Wuhan. Yet local officials initially withheld information from the central government in Beijing about the outbreak.20 An employee of one Chinese genomics company said that on January 1 an official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission instructed the company to stop testing samples related to the Wuhan outbreak and destroy all of the lab’s remaining specimens. The impulse to contain the troubling results eventually spread to officials in Beijing. Two days later, on January 3, the country’s top health authority, the National Health Commission, ordered the local genomics labs not to publish any sequencing information related to the novel coronavirus.21 News of the outbreak would be shared through the postings of anxious doctors who took to social media to exchange the sequencing information.