But that SARS-CoV virus had one feature, or the absence of a feature, standing between it and a global nightmare in 2003. “Which was, for the most part, asymptomatic people didn’t transmit until they were sick. So you had time.” You could identify cases, trace contacts, and quarantine. It could be stopped, for those reasons, and it was. If the virus had been a little different, “highly transmissible, with more variable disease manifestation, harder to figure out who were silent carriers, then we may never have been able to contain SARS.”
