Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, David Quammen, 2022

Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, David Quammen, 2022, p. 4.

The first alert:

• posted on social media by Yize (Henry ) Li, a China-born virologist and immunologist;
• he is now an assistant professor at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
• doctorate at: Institut Pasteur, Shanghai, under mentorship of a French professor
• came to US in 2013; postdoctoral fellowship with Susan R. Weiss, veeteran viroologist at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine;
• Weiss: an authority on coronavirus; long history of research
• SARS (2003); MERS (2012); 
• Henry Li was in Philadelphia in late December, 2019
  
• noticed an item on a Chinese news website, DiYiCaiJing, Shanghai
• item: 
• advisory, and probably meant to be confidential
• sent to the staff at a Wuhan hospital (was probably sent to more than one hospital)
• supposedly origiinated from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission
• warned of an outbreak of an "unknown pathogen" causing pneumonia in several cities in Wuhan
• and, that information was placed on social media in late 2019
  

A lot packed into those few lines.

To conclude this section:

• That initial item (above).
• then virologists immediately started posting the genome -- consistent with a coronavirus.
• Weiss: on sabbatical in La Jolla, CA
• now speaking with Li in weekly Zoom meetings
• Henry Li told her a "new" coronavirus was circulating in China
• on January 2, 2020, Weiss returned to Philadelphia
• her crew immediately began ordering more N95 masks, along with more PPE
• later, they would order powered air purifying respirators (PAPRs) -- think space helmets without the suits
• Weiss knew she needed to "work" on this "new" coronavrus.

Next section:

• Marjorie Pollack
• deputy editor of ProMED-maill
• ProMED: an email service with roughlly 80,000 subscribers, devoted to detecting, gathering, and disseminating reliable information about disease events happening moment-to-moment anywhere in the world
• it began in 1994 with a subscribership of forty;
• now run by the International Socitey for Infectious Diseases
• it's free, independent, and apolitical
• Pollack has been part of the organization since 1997

Chapter 23:

• two sites on the genome:
• RBD: receptor binding domain; affinity for ACE2
• furin cleavage domain
• see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-021-00418-x.
• RBD looked unique; too perfect for ACE2 reception; not known in nature --> engineered?
• see this post, also.
  

Chapter 24:

• enter stage left: the pangolin!
• pangolins wer trafficked through Guangdong and confiscated by wildlife officials eaerlier in 2019

Chapter 33:

High-speed rail map for China. Link here.

Wuhan is the center for high-speed trains (in China). It's the hub for high-speed trains everywhere in China.

Wuhan is a city of eleven million people, the largest in central China.

Among the first Chinese [Covid-19] studies published internationally was one in The Lancet. This study, from a group of 41 people including medical staff at Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, where many of the December, 2019, cases got treatment, appeared online on January 24, 2020 -- the same day as K.Y. Yuen's report of the family cluster in Shenzhen and the ominous hint of asymptomatic spread.

Twenty-seven of the forty-one had links to the [Wuhan market] but fourteen did not.

The earliest of all forty-one patients was identified / diagnosed on December 1, 2019. The epidemic (not yet a pandemic) most likely began in November, 2019, and at some location other than the [Wuhan market].

First confirmed Covid-19 case was likely "a" Mr Chen who fell sick on December 8, 2019; Mr Chen reported no links to the Huanan market. He shopped at a larger supermarket.

The first recorded fatality was a sixty-one-year-old man, a regular customer at the Huanan market. The date was not specifically given of this man's death but appears to have been on / before January 24, 2020. By that date, there were 24 confirmed Covid-19 deaths. 

So, where did the virus first begin circulating? Three possibilities (among others):

• in the city of Wuhan, or elsewhere in Hubei province;
• somewhere between Wuhan and the caves of Yunnan (bats); or,
• northern Italy.