By JOEL ACHENBACH, ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA AND FRANCES STEAD SELLERS | The Washington Post | Published: March 9, 2021
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New Year's Eve 2019: Ian Lipkin, a famed Columbia University epidemiologist, is having dinner with his wife and a fellow scientist. He gets a confidential phone call from a highly placed source in China: There's a cluster of pneumonia-like illnesses in the city of Wuhan caused by a novel coronavirus. The source says it's not that big a deal: It doesn't look very transmissible.