Uncontrolled Spread summary

Fortunately, not everyone in the Chinese medical community adhered to the order not to publish the sequencing information for the virus, which had been named SARS-CoV-2. The severity of the threat was clear – this was a new coronavirus and it appeared to be highly contagious. 

Some concerned doctors took to social media and published the genetic sequence themselves. But even after the information got out, there was still resistance to warning people. 

Early on, the US government’s approach was to treat the pandemic like a flu outbreak, an approach that had originated in 2005 with President George W. Bush. 

At the time, there were fears around the threat of the H5N1 avian flu virus. Bush read the book The Great Influenza, which explained how pandemics are a recurring inevitability, happening around once a century, and it made an immediate impact. He quickly assembled a team to come up with a better national strategy. 

In April 2000, President Bill Clinton labeled the global spread of AIDS a threat to US national security. It was a huge step, and the first time an infectious disease had received such a designation. Unfortunately, it never led to a federal program that looked at other contagions in the same way. 

For a long time, researchers had warned that the US should no longer expect to be protected from diseases that once seemed rare or confined to remote parts of the world. Then, in 2006, after an attention-grabbing SARS outbreak, Congress earmarked some money for creating a public health awareness network. 

You need two kinds of tests when dealing with a pandemic: PCR tests and antigen tests. For a while, the CDC was in charge of handling both but unable to meet the demands of either. 

Generally speaking, PCR tests, which are handled in a lab, are the more accurate of the two. To help it track the virus, the CDC wanted to process all of these itself, but this meant lots of delays because of the sheer volume of cases. 

In stark contrast to the US’s chaotic and poorly thought-through response, one country in particular stood out. In South Korea, the COVID crisis was progressing very differently. Both the US and South Korea had identified their first cases of COVID-19 in mid-January. But, unlike the US, South Korea was prepared in all the right ways. 

This was due in part to its experience with a serious MERS outbreak in 2015, which led to 82 cases, the largest outbreak outside the Middle East. As a result of this prior event, South Korea made a series of decisions that would show the world exactly what pandemic readiness should really look like.

If there’s been one bright side to the COVID-19 crisis, it’s that the technology for producing vaccines has proved ready to meet the challenge. Traditionally, vaccines are made through a cultivation process that requires lots and lots of chicken eggs. But now, all the biotech company Moderna needed was the sequence of the virus’s genetic information, called RNA. Six weeks after it had that, it had a vaccine it could start testing.

The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, as well as others, use what is known as mRNA technology. This creates a vaccine that causes a person’s immune system to produce antibodies to target a specific virus. What’s especially impressive is that mRNA vaccines are not only quick to make in large batches, they’re also easy to alter when a virus mutates.