Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

Santa Clara County in northern California, encompassing the city of San Jose and Silicon Valley, was one of the first areas in the United States to be hit. Sara Cody could see it coming. Cody, a physician and epidemiologist with degrees from Stanford and the Yale School of Medicine, and experience doing outbreak investigations for the CDC, served as health officer and public health director for Santa Clara County. “Forty percent of the people that live in our county were born outside of the U.S.,” she told me. Practicing public health in such a place, at the south end of San Francisco Bay, always felt like a globalized challenge. “There’s lots and lots and lots of travel, for personal and professional reasons, and I think that is probably the reason why we tend to see—as infections are emerging—we tend to see them here first.”