Worldwide Pandemic, 2020 A.D.
Three years ago, a short news segment appeared on The National. If you had looked away briefly, you would have missed it. But soon, no one anywhere in the world would be able to look away from what had happened in a city in China, thousands of miles away.
The images from this place, Wuhan, looked surreal. Medical teams fanning out across an abandoned cityscape in hazmat suits, frightened residents huddling in quarantined apartments, excited broadcasts in a language we did not comprehend. It seemed unreal, and so far away.
At the time we were calling it the Coronavirus, and it didn’t stay far away. It travelled the world and changed the world. In fact, rarely has something so physically small been so immensely transformative in history. Think about the world before March of 2020 — so much of it is gone.
When this news first appeared on the screen, I did not look away, because this is my own scientific specialty, a field which has fascinated me from my earliest academic years. I did not fully grasp the importance of the moment — no one, not even top world health officials, did — but I knew that something was happening, something grave and concerning.
The months that would follow changed the focus of my specialties — the study of bioaerosols using genomics and bioinformatics — from academic theory into real-life consequences for people and populations. For the first time, the fields I had researched for many years gained greater visibility, and new appreciation.
My post-doctoral research into the whole-genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 was particularly relevant as global scientific teams searched for answers to some fundamental questions, including how the virus was transmitted, how long it could linger in the air, how wide its distribution pattern was, and what effective measures could be taken by individuals, institutions, businesses and governments to protect people, especially the most vulnerable.
After several months of study, specialists in aerosol and atmospheric science concluded that this new virus could stay suspended in the air for hours, and that social distancing protocols were limited in their ability to prevent inhalation of these dispersed particles in indoor public settings.
Many of these scientific discoveries were not communicated efficiently to the wider public, however, nor understood once they were. Even now, there are many who believe that sanitizing surfaces is the key to limiting the spread of the virus. A great inflexibility had taken hold in the minds of many people. For some, what a person believed or didn’t believe about the transmission of the virus became a litmus test, even an ideology.
Looking back, some of the absurdities that resulted from this mindset are obvious: Do you remember surfers being arrested at the beach? Our grandchildren will marvel at the fact that once someone thought it was a good idea — a mandatory way of thinking — that people should be separated from sun, fresh air and exercise to keep them healthy.
Few policymakers have apologized for such errors, but as a microbiologist I am by training forgiving when it comes to decisions taken quickly in a pandemic. Everyone in my field has closely studied the mass disease outbreaks of history. During the great plagues, such as the Black Death that killed a third of the population of medieval Europe, no one in authority had the luxury of time to make prudent decisions. No one had perfect knowledge of what was happening. As people dropped in the streets, superstition reigned.
Guided by science, we have come a long way from those times; but in many ways we are the same fragile species, trying hard to understand what changed our world so suddenly.
