I’m a model of infectious diseases. My organization’s scientists have been on the lookout for the Covid-19 epidemic almost from the beginning.
But when is the beginning?
One of the wonderful things about clinical life is that it is universal and that it makes friends and acquaintances all over the world.
There are times in everyone’s life when you realize that the global has been replaced forever, rarely accompanied by the fact that one’s own wisdom is special, that other people who want to know have not yet been, and that it is your burden the percentage of the One Day, I won a call informing me that my children’s beloved grandmother had passed away. When I walked into the room to tell you, there was an innocence I knew you’d leave before you left her. not knowing. But they wanted to know.
I think for many scientists something similar happened in January or February of this year, but it wasn’t the young people who had to say it, but the world.
That moment is personal, deeply emotional. Recently, I contacted several clinical friends around the world: epidemiologists, population ecologists, mathematicians, biologists and others who were expected to have had that moment, to ask them what it was. This is what they wrote.
I was in the lab, starting to paint on Covid-19, and that’s when the first case imported to Japan was diagnosed on January 15, it was the case at the time in the world, and that’s how it was for me. There were only 50 cases similar to Wuhan’s rainforest, however, there were already two cases diagnosed outside China. I came here to make sure there were so many cases of human-to-human transmission, and that’s when I learned it would be a pandemic.
– Hiroshi Nishiura, Kyoto
On 23 January, at an NIH assembly similar to the prospective search for pandemic pathogens. Everyone had heard the news [that Wuhan had been locked up] and were beginning to wonder if it would be a big deal. fear has become more serious.
– Marc Lipsitch, Boston
In retrospect, I am surprised at how it was imaginable to keep the ghost that this would not be seriously affected by Covid-19 for so long. Of course, this is perhaps understandable to the extent that it has hit fashion society to a degree that no other recent emerging disease had ever had. For me, the authenticity that Covid-19 was going to be a major force to replace globally and personally intensified in a few days. At the end of February, he was closely following the news of the accumulating in the number of cases across Europe. However, life continued as usual. During the first week of March, I was finishing an assembly in Heidelberg, Germany, when I learned that there had been positive cases on our Zurich campus. I wasn’t worried about the infection because because of other trips, I hadn’t. I was on campus before leaving for Germany, however, it made Covid-19 a real risk. In the exercise back in Zurich, I felt like everyone was coughing.
– Anna-Liisa Laine, Zurich
I’ve been leading the JHU team that’s been tracking the new coronavirus since January 22, when we first shared the Covid-19 CSSE dashboard. Within a week, it was already circulating a lot on social media platforms, it was collected through the mainstream. media and had recorded more than a billion views. The popularity of the service has led to an avalanche of direct communications from users around the world, indicating a critical point of public concern. In addition, while managing the knowledge collection process, it was also in reaction to user demand, public engagement and differential scale, we had to make strategic decisions at the end of January on how to manage the dashboard more effectively, whether in terms of knowledge collection and computational infrastructure. Support. Together, these reports have managed practically to negate the seriousness of the existing situation.
– Lauren Gardner, Baltimore
In late January 2020, I learned that Covid-19 had a pandemic outlook based on the speed at which it was already spreading in China and the fact that instances were beginning to appear in other countries. I was training freshman calculus at the time. I used the WHO Emerging Case Count to teach academics how to solve an undeniable epidemic. The students were amazed at the strength of the exponential growth. Seven weeks later, this elegance was transferred online when our province entered a state of emergency.
– Chris Bauch, Waterloo
At the beginning of the pandemic, we conducted two studies that revealed the enormity of the risk. The first review estimated the invisible prevalence and geographical spread of SARS-CoV-2 before the closure of Wuhan on 23 January. Days before the closure, our analyses revealed that there were thousands of undetected cases in Wuhan and that the virus had already gone unnoticed in dozens of cities in China. Our time to examine, however, was the real glyth. In early February, we still expected the methods used to involve SARS in 2003 to serve sarS-CoV-2. On February 18, based on an investigation of 450 Chinese cases, we were surprised to discover that SARS-CoV-2 spreads approximately twice as fast as SARS and before symptoms even develop. I do not vividly forget where I was, at my kitchen table in Austin, Texas, defeated at night, when I had the profound authenticity that this new virus had the ingredients of an unprecedented global risk: stealthy and fatal, but not fatal. enough to drive the necessary response.
– Lauren Myers, Austin
My moment at about the same time as yours [Stefan and I had a brief correspondence about cases that appeared to be in Singapore] in mid-February, when imported cases began to appear here and the running organization formed and called us to paint there, then we split the organizations and then painted from home each and every dayArray adding each and every weekend.
– Stefan Ma, Singapore
I live in Nice, about an hour from the Italian border, and in early March we gained conflicting messages about France’s fitness (“as usual, things are under control”) and Italy (“whole blocked cities, thousands of people die” I teach a course every year on the dynamics of diseases, so I obviously understood how exponential dynamics would hit us and we were ready for what was to come. A few days later, we were in a serious blockage for more than 2 months.
– Elodie Vercken, Nice
It was scheduled to be February 20. Our undergraduate students were reading mid-term, we were in the middle of recruiting graduate students and I had just planned my vacation to attend an infectious disease convention in Seattle in April. I reported that asymptomatic transmission was imaginable for this new virus, that’s when I really cared for the first time, things temporarily escalated from there On February 26th the first case of the US was detected. UU. no related to travel and there was evidence of network transmission I do not forget that one of the first things I did was touch my branch colleagues who run rain labs (non-infectious diseases) to alert them to contingency plans in case of closure. be bigger than we were prepared.
– Shweta Bansal, Washington, D. C.
Lately I’ve been applying at the Sultanate of Oman. We have begun to stick to the news of the spread of the new coronavirus, before it was officially announced through WHO as a pandemic, the propagation rate and geographical configuration alerted me and my circle of relatives that this was going to be a genuine problem. At that time (mid-February to early March), some American scientists visited us to help us expand control plans for grass parks. They started panicking and thinking about the option of going home if things got worse. tactics to return home and were nevertheless able to locate posts on the last flight from Oman.
– Ali Hassan, Muscat
Not all epidemics become pandemics. The first signs of H7N9 in 2013 were a bit like COVID (pneumonia, possible human-to-human transmission, etc. ), but this epidemic has disappeared. As I learned more and more about COVID during the first few weeks of January, that this new outbreak was caused by a new coronavirus, with sustained human-to-human transmission and asymptomatic or presymptomatic spread and the point of concern it caused, I had a very bad feeling that this occasion would be difficult to involve and would be very serious.
– Nita Madhav, San Francisco
For me, it was in mid-January that it became clear that it was not a repeated overflow of a non-human source and the lack of genetic diversity meant that it was a very recent origin. When the Imperial College report estimated that the length of the epidemic in Wuhan was thousands founded on the exported instances, we knew it was an expanding human epidemic.
– Andrew Rambaut, Edinburgh
The first 3 cases of Covid-19 in the Czech Republic were reported on 1 March. I think it would be a good opportunity to see how well popular epidemiological models fit the data, since it was quite transparent that epidemics would not temporarily disappear, I was dissatisfied that the meetings and trips abroad I was planning were cancelled this year and I would not meet with my friends and colleagues. As all schools temporarily closed on February 11, I had to locate the maximum productive way to continue my coaching very temporarily. I spent most of my time until the end of the semester recording video conferences for my courses and contacting students. In general, distance learning took longer than normal touch training. Unfortunately, due to the recent construction in The Number of Positive Cases in My Country, it is transparent that a similar scenario will also continue in the fall semester.
– Vlastimil Krivan, Eské Budjovice
For me, the turning point came on March 13. This Friday was our category day with my undergraduate course in ecology at the National University of Cuyo. We had told the academics that there was a chance that we would have to move to some kind of While we were doing an exercise in plant sampling strategies that day in the outdoor garden of our building, our vice dean told me that he thought that at the speed of the expansion of the number of cases, around mid-April , you will have to move on to virtuality, this gave us at least a month to adapt to the new format, so I was surprised to be informed in that night’s news that our university had to move without delay to virtuality. a lot of solving artistic challenges.
– Diego Vasquez, Mendoza
I began to perceive that the Covid-19 was going to be a big challenge at the end of February, when I was in a short film to France before returning to Mexico City, at that time I learned that this was the pandemic that many of us. Until now, we had controlled (mostly) epidemics caused by new viruses (Zika, avian influenza, Ebola, West Nile, etc. ) “However, it was transparent that one day one of them would spread then, when I returned to Mexico City, other people were definitely calmer than in France, but it was also transparent to them that something big was about to happen.
– Benjamin Roche, Mexico City
A few moments stand out for me. The first was in early February, when we were about to board a plane for a circle of relatives on vacation in Aspen with my then 6-month-old son, and it happened to me that the coronavirus infection can only be a threat to air travel and I had no idea how bad it was for young children. I texted a pediatrician friend, who confided that it wasn’t too bad for young children and that I shouldn’t worry about getting on the plane. The moment was in early March, when we started running from home (major local employers Apple and Google had transported staff home at noon and encouraged them to start running from home), and I told my lab that they have option to checkered from home if they feel more comfortable. Within a week, we had a shelter-in-place order in the county (the first in the country), and I started to realize this was going to be like our generation’s 1918 flu pandemic. It was at this point that my lab began to think about how we could contribute to the clinical and public understanding of the epidemic and its control using mathematical models and online visualization tools.
– Erin Mordecai, Stanford
I have an email dated February 27, 2020 replying to a colleague: “My mind in Covid-19: the pandemic is very likely. “It was such a dry and intellectual statement, and I am incredulous that I have been able to write those words such ease and certainty while feeling the general uncertainty and concern of how it might develop.
– Barbara Han, Millbrook
I do not forget to return home from the paintings one night in early March, to return from what would be my last vacation this year. This week was the week St. Jude gave up on similar paintings and many options it had planned to approve were canceled on its own. I was mentally going through my calendar in my head and thinking about meetings that would probably be canceled, airline tickets and hotels that I had to deal with, other miscellaneous vacations that I would have to stick to and trying to figure out how long. of the disturbance. would last. Thinking of all the problems that have now become familiar, the vaccine progression programs, the ability of viruses to recover with lax surveillance, I had a growing sense of concern that things would go wrong for me. long time. They got me thinking about things much more vital than my painting vacation, like upcoming weddings, family circle gatherings, “dream vacations” that my friends had spent months or years planning, and I’ve become incredibly sad. It was the first time that I think I fully learned that there would be no solution.
– Paul Thomas, Memphis
Two moments mark me. The first took a position in the first week of February, when I saw the first signs that there could be a really extensive transmission before other people developed symptoms. Despite hopes of immediate participation, it is clear that the location of contacts alone would have difficulty in involving outbreaks. by 19 February, when two deaths were reported in Iran, the first in the country, which meant that there had probably been significant undetected transmission. A few days later, an organization of serious cases reported in Lombardy, Italy, suggested that outbreaks this weekend, it was difficult to see how the Covid-19 epidemics were not yet underway in many other countries.
– Adam Kucharski, London
I feel like I’m in a position to worry about Covid-19 from the beginning. Throughout my career, I have an idea of exponential expansion. In early February 2020, I was worried. I’m also willing to worry about Covid-19 because I live in Seattle. When the first instances started spreading in Seattle, I started drawing plots, day after day. It is very transparent that the number of instances expanded exponentially. I probably wouldn’t worry about 8 instances or 10 instances, extrapolating those instances, and it seemed that hundreds, then thousands, of instances were on the horizon. On February 15, after reviewing my exponential expansion charts, I contacted our monetary planner.
– Daniel Promislow, Seattle
I started tracking Covid-19 data early enough, before the pandemic started and took off. During January and February of this year, I continued to see the number of instances and countries increasing, but it was remote. had to stop at Kruger National Park in South Africa for a conference. Although I have no idea the option of being infected, I must say I wasn’t worried yet. After the conference, I traveled to southern Swaziland with a colleague Curiously, the moment I learned that the Covid-19 was going to replace the global was when we moved to Swaziland through a rural checkpoint, where there were nurses who were raising the temperature and looking for symptoms of infection miles and miles away. any primary transportation hub. That’s when I realized.
– Peter Thrall, Canberra
I received a briefing from WHO and some Chinese colleagues as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group of the WHO Master Plan for R
– Betz Halloran, Seattle
[Appointments have been amended briefly. I thank all those friends for sharing those moments with me. ]
I’m a pinté scientist at the University of Georgia, where I’m a professor at the Odum School of Ecology and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Ecology. I fell in love with nature as a child and theoretical biology when I was a young adult. My studies use mathematics, statistics, pc models and experiments to perceive the dynamics of biological populations. I’m interested in ecological turning points, the ecology of emerging infectious diseases and extinction. My purpose is to make science that fears people, earth and the planet.