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

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

Why did the SARS-1 outbreak die out after its extraordinary opening act—featuring rapid global spread, many super-spreader events, and rising alarm—whereas the SARS-2 outbreak did not? It was not just that there was somehow a more efficient public health response in 2003. After all, SARS-1 spread to many countries and it did so in many places, from

Because the SARS-1 pandemic is well behind us, it is very easy to compute its CFR by simply dividing all observed deaths by all observed cases. Since the disease killed 916 out of 8,472 people that came to medical attention worldwide, that’s a crude CFR of 10.9 percent. But for some populations, such as elderly people in Hong Kong, as many as 50 pe

One of these features, paradoxically, was that SARS-1 was actually too deadly. Epidemiologists quantify the lethality of pathogens in two primary ways. The infection fatality rate (IFR) is the probability a person will die if he or she gets infected. The case fatality rate (CFR) is the probability a person will die after being diagnosed with the co

The class of virus to which SARS-2 belongs gets its name from its appearance under an electron microscope. When this type of virus was first visualized, in 1968, it was seen to have a crown-like feature on the outside, hence the name coronavirus (corona comes from an old Greek word denoting a wreath worn as a crown).70 This crown is actually compos

In addition to the CFR and the mismatch period, another key parameter of SARS-2 was investigated in early 2020: How many new cases does each case give rise to? For each person who becomes infected, how many other people, on average, does that individual infect? This number is known as the effective reproduction number, denoted Re (sometimes also kn

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.

The initial “imported” cases set off local outbreaks via cascades of what epidemiologists term community transmission.

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

To make matters worse, sometimes the immune system overreacts to the invader, setting in motion something known as a “cytokine storm” that worsens, rather than improves, the situation. In the process, the body releases substances intended to help coordinate the defense against the invader, but the substances wind up harming cells in the lungs (and