The intruder crept in while we were thinking about other things.
About how much we loved, or loathed, our president. About whether the Lakers or Clippers had loaded up best for an NBA championship run. About whether there was room on our New Year's Eve schedules to check out that Korean boy band, BTS, playing a gig from Times Square. Maybe even about whether the car needed new tires.
America's quotidian concerns loomed large in those waning days of 2019 and the start of the new year. But the everyday shrank away for a coterie of researchers, physicians, public health officers and science journalists, connected by the internet and by their uncommon concern for the deadly germs that lurk along the animal-human divide.
It began for Peter Daszak, a British American scientist, a couple of days after Christmas. While the rest of the world trundled along, the president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance was in his office in lower Manhattan, picking up the first clues of something amiss.
Weibo, China's Twitter, carried the warning signals: An odd illness in the city of Wuhan. Patients in respiratory distress. Some developing pneumonia. A few dying, or so said the reports, unconfirmed. Most of the sick had worked in, or visited, a "wet" market in the central Chinese city, where live fish, crabs and livestock are sold, gill-by-jowl, alongside more exotic fare, such as snakes, hedgehogs and bamboo rats.
An ebullient zoologist and parasitologist, Daszak had associates around the globe in the One Health movement _ the professional community trying to prevent the spread of disease between the animal and human worlds. But, as New Year's approached, his colleagues in China suddenly went mum.
"They were all saying 'I'm sorry, I can't talk. We're very busy. We'll talk to you soon.' They wouldn't respond, even to a 'Happy New Year's' message. That wasn't normal," Daszak recalled. "That's when you know, you just know, something serious is going down."
Those fleeting days of 2019 and the first three months of 2020 have passed in a blur for America and the world, turned upside down by a virus previously not identified by humankind and now responsible for a death toll that has climbed past 100,000.
For the 54-year-old Daszak and his fellow germ trackers, it's been a period of long hours and roiling emotions _ anxiety about the trajectory of the killer they spotted in its first days, a queasy satisfaction that their years of warnings had not been misplaced and a stolid determination to do more to prepare the world for the pandemics yet to come.
There's also frustration, and some anger, as they watch world leaders move too slowly to marshal healthcare workers, set aside medical supplies and, especially, to isolate millions of people with no immunity to the new invader.
It appears probable that the disease found its first human victim as early as October, and that the virus now labeled SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in the tiny horseshoe bat, not much bigger than a large moth. Reporting by award-winning disease journalist Laurie Garrett suggests that the outbreak might not even have originated in the South China Seafood Market, implicated by the Chinese government. The hunt for answers continues.
"We've talked about this in the abstract form for years," said Daszak from his home in the Hudson River Valley, where he is now sheltering in place with his wife and two grown daughters. "When we go to policymakers and say, 'Look, this could be the next big one.' Then afterward we might think, 'Well, am I over-exaggerating the risk?'
"Now it's just the most bizarre feeling. The bat coronavirus, one of the many that we have worked on for years, is here, in my neighborhood. It's around the world. And it's killing people."
Daszak and his team at EcoHealth Alliance weren't the only ones scrambling at the end of 2019 to understand the tidbits escaping from Wuhan, a sprawling city of more than 11 million in central China's Hubei province.
In mid-December, Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown Law, had a guest over to dinner. "I just heard from a friend in Wuhan that there is a novel coronavirus, and it looks very serious," Gostin remembered saying. "He just said, 'Pass the biscuits.'" Few people grasped the potentially catastrophic implications of an outbreak in China. Gostin would spend the next weeks imploring international bodies to take this new threat seriously.
