David Quammen Quote
One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills—maybe even the cough—precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode—not just lucky but salvational.
One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills—maybe even the cough—precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode—not just lucky but salvational.
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About David Quammen
A collection of Quammen's drafts, research, and correspondence is housed in Texas Tech University's Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. The collection consists of approximately 63 boxes of publicly available literary production, artifacts, maps, and other papers dated from 1856–2014.