The Plague Year

Excerpts, paraphrased notes and timeline of Covid-19 pandemic from 25 Days That Changed the World: How Covid-19 Slipped China’s Grasp & The Plague Year:

January 3, 2020 - George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, when pressed, assured Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. 

At the time, the theory was that each case had arisen from animals in a “wet” market where exotic game was sold. The Chinese hid the news of the 2003 SARS outbreak, and, when rumors arose, authorities minimized the severity of the disease, though the fatality rate was approximately ten per cent.  It ultimately reached some thirty countries and was contained eight months after it emerged. 

January 5, 2020 - Professor Zhang Yongzhena, leading virologist at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center,  and his team had cracked the virus’s genetic code and finished sequencing the virus

January 10, 2020 - The data was uploaded to a virology website

January 13, 2020 - Within a day after Dr. Barney S. Graham and Dr. Jason McLellan downloaded the sequence for -CoV-2, they had designed the modified proteins. Dr. Jason McLellan is a structural biologist whose work with Barney Graham opened a new front in the war against infectious disease. The key accelerating factor was that they already knew how to alter the spike proteins of other coronaviruses. In 2017, Graham arranged a demonstration project for pandemic preparedness, with  MERS and Nipah serving as prototypes for a human vaccine using Moderna’s messenger-RNA platform. They turned their scheme over to Moderna, for manufacturing. Six weeks later, Moderna began shipping vials of vaccine for clinical trials. Typically, it takes years, if not decades, to go from formulating a vaccine to making a product ready to be tested: the process privileges safety and cost over speed. Dr. Barney S. Graham is the chief architect of the first authorized COVID vaccines. 

January 14, 2020 - China’s National Health Commission called together medical officials across China for a video meeting — kept secret at the time — that laid out precautions against the virus.

January 19, 2020 - Coronavirus officially arrives in America.

January 20, 2020 -  C.D.C. had created a diagnostic test but the F.D.A. couldn’t authorize it until February 4th.

January 23, 2020 — Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, is sealed off

January 25, 2020 - China’s Lunar New Year holiday

February 7, 2020 -  Li Wenliang, a Wuhan doctor who was reprimanded by the police after trying to alert colleagues to the coronavirus, passes away after contracting the virus

February 12, 2020 -  Dow Jones closed at 29,551—a record high at the time.

March 11, 2020 -  W.H.O. declares the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus.

March 13, 2020 - First Covid-19 death in India.  Crossed 100 (6 Apr), 1,000 (29 Apr), 10,000 (16 Jun), 50,000 (17 Aug) and 100,000 (3 Oct), 125,000 (7 Nov), 147,000 (24 Dec).

March 23, 2020 -  Sensex falls to a 36-month low of 26,321.88, Nifty 100 to 7719

March 24, 2020 - 21-day lockdown announced in India

April 3, 2020 -  C.D.C. finally proclaimed that masks were vital weapons.

December 4, 2020 -  Dow hits record highs 

December 11, 2020 -  F.D.A. granted its first Emergency Use Authorization for a  vaccine. Created by Pfizer, in partnership with the German firm BioNTech, it uses the modified protein that Graham and McLellan designed. In its third and final human trial, it was deemed ninety-five per cent effective. In another major development, Eli Lilly received an Emergency Use Authorization for a monoclonal antibody that is also based on the spike protein that Graham and McLellan designed.

December 31, 2020 -  Sensex ends at 47751.33, Nifty 100 at 14091

The C.D.C. was founded in 1946, as the Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta. Five years later, America was declared malaria-free.

Humanity’s encroachment into formerly wild regions, coupled with climate change, which has forced animals out of traditional habitats, has engendered many new diseases in humans, including Ebola and Zika. 

Stealth transmission is why polio has been so hard to eradicate.

Nobody alive had seen a catastrophe of such scale.

It took a couple years just to figure out that H.I.V. was a virus

A vaccine trains the immune system to recognize a virus in order to counter it.

Coronaviruses have been infecting humans for as long as eight centuries, but before  and  they caused only the common cold.

In 2012, the MERS coronavirus emerged in Saudi Arabia. It was extremely dangerous to work with: a third of infected people died. Ominously, it was the second novel coronavirus in ten years.

Herd immunity is gained when roughly seventy per cent of a population has effective antibodies to the disease, through either infection or vaccination.

In the US, forty per cent of adults are obese, nearly half have cardiovascular disease, and one in thirteen has asthma.

“Political divisiveness doesn’t lend itself to having a coordinated, cooperative, collaborative response against a common enemy. There is also this pushback in society against anything authoritative, and scientists are perceived as being authority, so that’s the reason I believe we have an anti-science trend, which leads to an anti-vaccine trend.” - Dr. Fauci

The influence of Goldman Sachs pervades American economic policy. Three of the twelve presidents of the Federal Reserve have worked there. 

The market recovery in 2020 was led by five stocks—Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon—accounting for more than twenty per cent of the S. & P.

The current split between the stock market and the employment numbers is a flashing warning that the economy and the people are not the same.

“It’s important to have experts, but they aren’t always right: they can be hampered by their own orthodoxies, their own egos, their own narrow approach to the world. You need broad-minded leaders who know how to hold people accountable, who know how to delegate, who know a good chain of command, and know how to make hard judgments." - Matt Pottinger