ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, GERVILLE
I first started working on this book at the beginning of one of the worst pandemics in history. On November 17, 2019, a bat coronavirus made its debut in the human population. The virus was called SARS-CoV-2 and the disease was called COVID-19 (coronavirus disease-2019). Just one year after it had arrived, the virus had infected hundreds of millions of people and killed more than a million, mostly from pneumonia. And it was just getting started.
Although this bat coronavirus was new, human coronaviruses have been around for decades. First identified in the early 1960s, human coronaviruses cause coughs, colds, sore throats, and pneumonia. At our hospital, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, human coronaviruses account for about 20 percent of all respiratory infections during the winter. This bat virus, however, was different.
All of these surprises occurred within the first year of the virus’s debut. It ...
