“It seemed to be locked and loaded for causing the pandemic,” Andersen told me.
This new virus, however, was spreading far more quickly, reaching at least twenty-six countries by the end of the month. It shared eighty per cent of its genome with the first SARS, and was more distantly related to MERS, another bat coronavirus. Chinese scientists had already established that it belonged to a genus of coronaviruses commonly found in bats in southern China. He found the degree of contagion not just scary but unusual. Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease expert at Scripps Research, in San Diego, began tracking the virus in January, 2020. Why? Did the virus jump from an animal to its first human host, its patient zero? Or, as some suspect, was the catastrophe the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, a city of eleven million people in central China?
Since the coronavirus first appeared, at the end of 2019, four and a half million people have died, countless more have suffered, whole economies have been upended, schools have been shuttered.
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