TOhe origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. On December 31, 2019, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post published the first news story on the «Mysterious Pneumonia Epidemic Erupted in Wuhan».
The city of Wuhan during the pandemic in 2020. (Getty Images)
If governments and the media had not yet publicized the threat that loomed on the horizon, some of the most competent virologists and epidemiologists in the international arena at that date had already taken steps to study the virus and advise countries on containment measures (mostly within start disregarded).
Three years of pandemic in one book
Who these scientists were and how they moved in those early hectic days is told with great narrative talent combined with extreme scientific accuracy David Quammen in Breathless (Adelphi).
Breathless by David Quammen, Aldephi526 pages, €26
The book analyzes the most dramatic junctions of three years of pandemicand gives space to the even conflicting hypotheses through which the therapy of the Sars – CoV 2 e vaccines have made their way.
Great space is given to still open question of the origin of the contagion: leap of species from animal to man (ie Spillover, like the title of the previous “prophetic” title of Quammen); accidental exit from the Wuhan virology laboratory where the team directed by the doctor Shi Zhengli studies the coronavirus virus in bats; virus artfully designed to spread effectively and lethally.
But Breathless also overlooks the future, examining hypotheses and theories on the evolution of Covid and on the strength of the variations. An exciting reconstruction of the work of scientists and their extraordinary feat of collaboration and research.
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