Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

That first U.S. case was a man who had flown home to Seattle from a family visit in Wuhan, then turned up at an urgent-care clinic in Snohomish, Washington, with symptoms. His swab samples went overnight to the CDC, tested positive there, and by January 21 his blood had been sampled too. “Every day after January 22 was a day missed—by the U.S. government,” Khan told me with some frustration. January 22 was a Wednesday. Leaders of America’s health agencies could have called in Becton, Dickinson, Khan added (referring to the giant multinational medical-technology company, headquartered in New Jersey), and told them: We want nationwide testing capacity ready by next week. Didn’t happen. Failure of imagination. “The lack of testing defined the rest of the outbreak for us.” South Korea could imagine the worst, and take prompt action, because they remembered SARS and MERS.