Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

For SARS-1, the R0 was computed to be in the range of 2.2 to 3.6, and it’s probably between 2.6 and 3.0.

A new pathogen has been introduced into our species, and in some form, it will now circulate among us forever.

The time between when a person is infected and when he or she shows signs or symptoms is called the incubation period. This ranges from two to fourteen days in SARS-2 (hence the recommended fourteen days of isolation) and is typically about six to seven days. For SARS-1, the incubation period was shorter, ranging from two to seven days. But there i

The virus had announced itself with extremely unfortunate timing, right at the start of the annual chunyun (春运) migration in China that was taking place in the run-up to the Lunar New Year festival, on January 25, 2020. During this period, over three billion trips are typically made, a mass movement that puts the annual Thanksgiving travel in the U

But the ship still offered observable evidence, and in the confusing early days of the pandemic, scientists pored over the data in dozens of papers, searching for any kind of signal in the noise. This defined and contained population of 3,711 people who were not allowed to disembark allowed epidemiologists to ascertain what fraction of a population

Only seven types of the coronavirus are known to infect humans. Four of them cause the common cold. Two of those four, OC43 and HKU1, originally came from rodents, and the other two, 229E and NL 63, came from bats. The other three types that afflict human beings are SARS-1, SARS-2, and Middle East respiratory syndrome, known as MERS.

Another ship, the Diamond Princess, was quarantined in Yokohama, Japan, on February 3, and it would play a crucial role in the epidemic, providing scientists with a kind of grim natural experiment. Despite how critical experiments are to scientific knowledge, there are many situations in which scientists cannot do experiments for practical or ethic

This image had first been conjured by an MIT professor of meteorology, Edward Lorenz, on December 29, 1972, at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The details were not exactly the same; Lorenz had used the image of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas.82 But the image was

Once in the lungs, the virus kills the cells that line the alveoli, little globular sacs that are responsible for oxygen exchange. Blood and fluid leak from the injured lung tissue into the sacs, which makes patients short of breath. They drown in their own fluids.