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

The disease also displays a great range of severity across patients. Perhaps half of those infected are entirely asymptomatic. For the remainder, the range of outcomes stretches from a mild illness (in most cases) to hospitalization (in perhaps 20 percent of cases) to death (in perhaps as many as 1 percent of cases).

But later investigation revealed that there had been other cases of atypical pneumonia earlier in December, above the threshold for notifying the central Chinese Center for Disease Control in Beijing, that had gone unreported. Precious time to contain the outbreak was lost. In fact, a later analysis documented that there were 104 cases and 15 death

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

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

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

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

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

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

By May 1, COVID-19 had become the leading daily killer in the United States, far eclipsing the deaths caused by the seasonal flu and even surpassing cancer and heart disease. By July 1, there were 130,761 recorded deaths in the United States and 518,135 deaths worldwide—and no end in sight.