Breathless
David Quammen
Simon & Schuster, $29.99
When COVID-19 burst onto the worldwide stage in 2020, it was lethal and disruptive. Within the first weeks of January, researchers recognized the trigger: A coronavirus was guilty, a relative of the virus that induced the 2003 SARS outbreak. Echoes of what had occurred practically 20 years earlier — 1000’s had been contaminated and at the very least 774 folks died earlier than the SARS outbreak was introduced below management — despatched ripples of hysteria all through the virology world.
Scientists of all backgrounds rushed to know the brand new scourge, dubbed SARS-CoV-2. Hospitals all over the world had been quickly overwhelmed, and every day life for billions of individuals was thrown into disarray. Quarantine, isolation, N95 masks and social distancing entered our collective lexicon. Breathless, by science author David Quammen, takes readers alongside on the following two-year scientific curler coaster.
The e book is a portrait of the virus — SARS-CoV-2’s early days in China, how many years of science helped researchers craft efficient vaccines inside a 12 months, the arrival of extremely mutated variants. It’s not in regards to the societal upheaval or the general public well being failures (and successes). Whereas Quammen acknowledges the significance of these points of the pandemic, he chooses to deal with the “firehose” of scientific research — each good and unhealthy — that drove our understanding of COVID-19.
He dives deep into one of many pandemic’s most controversial questions: The place did SARS-CoV-2 come from? Nature or the lab? Quammen describes the saga in elaborate element. First there have been worries that a number of the virus’s options appeared engineered. These issues had been shortly dispelled when researchers discovered these options in viruses from wild bats and pangolins. Then there was the thought that employees in a lab learning bat viruses might have turn out to be by accident contaminated and unknowingly unfold the virus to others.
Slightly than dismiss that unintentional lab leak speculation, Quammen takes readers step-by-step by way of the genetic and epidemiological information. That features current proof supporting the situation that the virus emerged — maybe in two separate jumps — from an unknown animal on the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China. By way of his conversations with consultants in virus ecology and evolution, readers study the nuances of how virologists do analysis and the controversies of gain-of-function research that take a look at what occurs when viruses purchase new traits. Quammen’s conclusion: An unintentional lab leak shouldn’t be unimaginable. “But it surely appears unlikely.”
To know the pandemic, Quammen attracts on classes discovered from our earlier run-ins with coronaviruses, together with the SARS outbreak and the 2012 MERS outbreak within the Center East (SN: 12/28/13, p. 23). A part of his 2012 e book Spillover targeted on the bat origin of the SARS outbreak (SN: 10/20/12, p. 30). That tome is unnervingly prescient. If the unique SARS coronavirus had been most contagious earlier than signs started, Quammen wrote in Spillover, officers would have had a a lot more durable time ending the outbreak. “It might be a a lot darker story,” he wrote. However that’s precisely what occurred with SARS-CoV-2. Folks can move the virus to others earlier than realizing they’re sick, a trait that helped COVID-19 spiral uncontrolled.
As a science journalist who has adopted SARS-CoV-2 since its discovery, I discovered Breathless to be surprisingly cathartic. My reminiscences of the previous couple of years have blurred collectively. Breathless presents the sweeping scientific story of the pandemic, connecting puzzle items that on the time had felt so misplaced.
Some readers could really feel it’s too quickly to scrutinize a pandemic that isn’t even over. However SARS-CoV-2 definitely received’t be the final dangerous virus to emerge. Quammen places the pandemic within the context of the coronavirus scares that got here earlier than to focus on how science builds on itself. And one factor is for certain: There will likely be one other. “There are a lot of extra fearsome viruses the place SARS-CoV-2 got here from,” he writes, “wherever that was.”
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