What was it like on the ground in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China? In this new excerpt from his book 'First Shots,' Brendan Borrell takes us back to January 2020
Wuhan had not been part of Michael Callahan’s original itinerary. On Jan. 17, 2020, he had stepped off a plane in the Chinese city of Nanjing after some thirty-odd hours in transit.
In the early 2000s, Callahan’s career took the first of many unexpected turns when the government sent him on a remarkable mission. His mandate was to form alliances with scientists at some of the most secretive bioweapons laboratories in Russia and the former Soviet states. “These guys ran the National Institute of Death for Russia, right?” Callahan said. His job was to harness their powers to fight disease rather than weaponize it.
For weeks, Callahan had been following the chatter coming out of Wuhan, some three hundred miles upriver from Nanjing. Shortly after Callahan arrived, his Chinese doctor colleagues heeded a countrywide alert to assist with the outbreak. Callahan could feel his own chest tighten at the thought of another hot zone. There was something about that hypervigilant state that made him feel most alive. If he went to Wuhan, Callahan knew he couldn’t worry his wife by telling her about his plan.
Gradually, more specialized white blood cells arrive on the scene, a process that can take longer in older patients and others with weakened immune systems. During this ramp-up, the body is homing in on specific weapons to fight the virus: antibodies. Antibodies are grabby, Y-shaped proteins that cling to other molecules. About one-fifth of the weight of your blood serum is made up of this whitish gunk.
Callahan was witnessing only the most dramatic and immediate impacts of severe infection, the way it stressed the lungs, the heart, and the kidneys. But when you push the immune system so hard, when your body is repeatedly detonating these grenades, not all of that damage can be repaired. Those patients lucky enough to emerge from the intensive care unit alive were not going to pop back into their normal lives the moment they were released. They would continue to have trouble breathing.
On Tuesday, Jan. 28, Kadlec received an e-mail from Callahan. He told him he had seen data showing that the incidence of the disease was four times that being reported to the WHO. The Chinese had 23,000 people under daily observation with confirmed infectious contacts. Of the 277 closely monitored patients he was following, 22 had been released and one had died. The virus stayed active in a person’s body for about nine days, which he believed posed “a major challenge.
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