By JOEL ACHENBACH, ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA AND FRANCES STEAD SELLERS | The Washington Post | Published: March 9, 2021
Stars and Stripes is making stories on the coronavirus pandemic available free of charge. See more staff and wire stories here. Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter here. Please support our journalism with a subscription. 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.
That virus would slowly reveal its secrets — and proceed to shut down much of the planet, killing more than 2.5 million people in the most disruptive global health disaster since the influenza pandemic of 1918.