Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

During late autumn 2019, a group of scientists led by Elisabetta Tanzi, an expert on viral diseases at the University of Milan, investigated what seemed to be an outbreak of measles. They saw thirty-nine suspected cases in patients who later tested negative—for measles, anyway. Each patient was sampled by oropharyngeal swab (a gentle dab to the back of the throat, not the kind that goes way up your nose and seems to tweak your brain), and the swab specimens stored. Months passed, the pandemic began, and it occurred to these scientists to retest those measles swabs for SARS-CoV-2. They found one positive specimen, taken from a four-year-old boy who lived near Milan. He had begun coughing on November 21. He got worse and, a week later, with vomiting and respiratory troubles, he was brought to an emergency room, and then developed a measles-like rash. But it wasn’t measles. According to the PCR testing of his swab, as eventually reported by Tanzi and her colleagues, it was SARS-CoV-2. Italy’s first recognized case of COVID-19 occurred three months later.