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

Modern genetic techniques were instrumental for understanding the fundamentals of the virus and ascertaining where it spread. The first step was mapping the virus’s genome—a more manageable task for a virus than for more complex organisms. The genome of every virus contains instructions for just a handful of proteins, and since viruses work by taki

This variation in R0 across individuals in a population can be quantified, and this quantity can have subtle but important effects on the course of an epidemic. The higher this variation (or dispersion), the more likely an epidemic will feature both super-spreading events and dead-end transmission chains. That is, an epidemic involving a population

Genetic sequencing showed that SARS-2 is 96.2 percent identical to a coronavirus found years ago in a bat in a cave in Yunnan, China (that virus is known as RaTG13). This confirms that SARS-2 originated in bats, where it probably circulated unnoticed for decades, but the virus also might have spent some time in pangolins before coming to our own sp

However, because of the scarcity of tests, the CDC initially recommended that people with respiratory complaints be tested only if they had a travel history to China or an exposure to a known COVID-19 case, guidance that would persist until February 27. As a result, in the six weeks after the identification of Patient Zero, only fifty-nine other ca

So, early in an epidemic, it is hard to know the CFR. Still, most authorities, using a broad array of data, samples, and methods from countries around the world, concluded that the overall CFR for COVID-19 was in the range of 0.5 to 1.2 percent. Since roughly half (or more) of patients with SARS-2 are asymptomatic, this meant that the IFR was half

Distinguishing among such alternatives is also difficult because it is not always possible to be absolutely certain. A key reason for this is that the rapid rate at which people transmit SARS-2 (the average interval between one person contracting it and then transmitting it to someone else is about a week) is faster than the rate at which the virus

Bats have been the origin for many other epidemics, such as the deadly Ebola and Marburg agents and the rare Hendra, Nipah, and St. Louis encephalitis viruses. It’s not known exactly why bats are such a prolific source of human pathogens, but they have haunted our species in other ways for a very long time as objects of mythology associated with de

While COVID-19 patients on average take about seven days from exposure to show symptoms, a meaningful percentage of carriers can spread the disease for two to four days before they are symptomatic.

In its approach, China had essentially detonated a social nuclear weapon. And so it was able to stop the spread of the virus. By late March, the number of new reported cases in the nation dropped from thousands per day to less than fifty per day.35 By April, the daily case count hit zero, and this in a country of 1.4 billion people.