Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

December 18, 2019.

What nature of bug seethed in this dollop of liquid human distress?

On January 1, according to Caixin, the health commission of Hubei province instructed the sequencing companies to “stop testing and destroy all samples.” It remains unclear whether that order was meant to contain a dangerous virus or dangerous information.

protruding like cloves in a roast ham,

“We never have had a completely unknown virus,” she said, that went “from first mention to first sequence in such a short period of time.”

“These cryptic cases of walking pneumonia,” Yuen’s group declared in a paper, written quickly and published online within two weeks in a major British journal, The Lancet, “might serve as a possible source to propagate the outbreak.”

The Wuhan CDC investigators were now calling this disease NCIP, for “novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia,” and labeling the virus itself 2019-nCoV.

on January 20, at a press conference in the ministry building of the National Health Commission, they announced that, yes, this virus was being transmitted person to person.

with the explicit message that these cases supplied evidence of person-to-person transmission.

If such asymptomatic infection was possible, asymptomatic spread of the virus was possible too.

That would make this novel coronavirus vastly more dangerous than the original SARS virus or any other bug within recent memory.

panic would be inefficient and futile.

the Great Influenza of 1918–1919, the last viral pandemic of the era before viruses could even be seen and identified,

Viruses can only replicate within living cells (they aren’t cells themselves), and all viruses mutate during replication—that is, they make small mistakes in copying their genomes to produce offspring.

RNA viruses mutate faster than almost any other sort of creature on Earth.

In fact, Burke wrote, they mutate about a thousand times faster than animals: roughly one mistake in ever...

Although the genomes of RNA viruses are relatively short, only a few thousand or twenty thousand or thirty thousand bases (compared to three billion bases for the human genome), that error rate is enough to put at least one mutation into every new virion (every viral particle) of the typical RNA virus. Result: each of th...

some mutations, by sheer chance, turn out to be helpful,

like railroad trains switching cars on a siding.

recombination gives viruses major new options and clears away genetic debris. It allows them to evolve by large chunks, as well as by the tiny increments of mutation.

“The fact that the most important emerging infectious diseases are highly recombinant,” he said, “is what leads to the strong hypothesis that it isn’t just mutation—that it’s the gene swapping—that is a critical feature of emergence.”

‘Improving the scientific basis to improve readiness,’

ecological events such as spillover involve something infinitely more complex and capricious than asteroid paths as calculated from Newtonian physics: behavior of living individuals.

“A disease anywhere is a disease everywhere.”

We dodged the bullet with SARS, and that may have been a bad thing, in the end, because I think we may have been better prepared if we had not dodged the bullet.”

respiratory cardiac arrest.”

the genomic sequence of a virus is distinct from any live virus that is grown, just as the genomic sequence of a lion is distinct from a live lion that might walk into your laboratory—but

this virus was already broadly adapted, it seemed, for infecting a variety of hosts.

an inchoate cookery of long molecules, simpler organic compounds, and energy.

Those are the three great limbs on the tree of life as presently drawn: Bacteria, Archaea, Eukarya.

So it’s important to apply basic tools of critical thinking—such as dispassion, scrutiny of sourcing, humility in the face of uncertainty, and parsimony—to what we hear, what we read, whom we trust, and what we think we know.

Illnesses resembling flu or common pneumonia were assumed to be flu or common pneumonia. Chains of infection came to dead ends.

If you hope to prevent it from adapting ever better to the human population, then prevent it from achieving abundant mutation by containing it fast, controlling the outbreak early, taking it seriously, keeping the human case numbers low, applying and adhering to robust nonpharmaceutical interventions until you have vaccines, then get everyone vaccinated, depriving the virus of opportunities to evolve. But we didn’t do that.

Evolution doesn’t carry creatures toward some platonic ideal of perfection. It carries them only toward success within a particular environment at a particular time.

there was a delay at the start of the pandemic, a period of relative stasis, during which no notable or alarming mutations were recognized in SARS-CoV-2.

to develop vaccine design concepts for at least one virus in each of the twenty-six viral families containing viruses known to infect humans—vaccine

a virus being “new to people” doesn’t mean it’s new to the world, and that “newly recognized by science” doesn’t necessarily mean new to people.

her person

A virus with a sylvatic cycle is two-faced, like a traveling salesman with another wife and more kids in another town.

There is no herd immunity where there is a sylvatic cycle.

some scientists considered it wildly reckless. Critics also argued that publishing the methodology of this experimental work was like offering a blueprint to bioterrorists.

journalists are not supposed to have friends. But authors, working a wider arc of history, character, and narrative, are allowed.

If the world could be persuaded that the virus reached Wuhan in a package of frozen halibut imported from Greenland, on the other hand, no one was to blame. Except perhaps Greenland fishmongers.

science: it’s a rational process leading toward ever-clearer understanding of the material world, but it’s also an activity performed by humans.

This virus is going to be with us forever. It will be in humans—always somewhere—and it will be in some of the animals that surround us.

We haven’t eradicated polio, despite decades of effort. We haven’t eradicated measles. And those viruses have nowhere to hide except within humans. This virus has many more options.

the truth of any event or person is fragmented, and those fragments are only available from diverse points of view.

reality in the round can only be grasped by adding up disparate perspectives.