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There is still much science doesn’t know about COVID-19, and so it may seem the height of hubris to write a book about the pandemic now. But I just did—and in researching and writing COVID-19, I found we can largely answer several important questions already.
How did the pandemic start? SARS-CoV-2 most likely jumped to people from bats—a virus already able to infect and replicate in human cells. Could we have stopped the pandemic? Our best chance would have been to stop it before it started: we could have done far more to prevent humans from catching viruses from bats. It can be done. Bats in the US carry rabies, for example, but human cases are vanishingly rare because, left to their own devices, the two rarely encounter each other.
Scientists have been warning of a zoonotic pandemic for decades. And many caution that there will ...
