A simple decision by one person may have led to the pandemic

Yesterday, Kevin Perry sent me this really interesting article that made a very powerful point: the pandemic wasn’t in any way “inevitable”. Just a simple decision by one person in Wuhan on one day in the late fall of 2019 may have been all it took to make the novel coronavirus become the source of a pandemic, rather than simply another new virus strain that infected a few people, then quickly went extinct. Of course, that person isn’t known and never will be – and they almost certainly don’t realize their role.

The article confirms that the first superspreading of the virus occurred at a particular seafood market in Wuhan. This has been suspected from the beginning of the pandemic, simply because all of the first reported infections were of people who worked in or visited the market. But there was also a lot of speculation early on that the fact that there were live animals at the market (fish in this case) was somehow the cause of the virus jumping to humans the first time.

This was partly because the first animal-to-human transmission of the SARS virus (which was stamped out worldwide relatively quickly by – ahem! – concerted effort among countries worldwide. Gee…I wonder why that concerted effort didn’t happen with the coronavirus?) in 2002 might have been at a live animal market. In fact, the Chinese government promised to shut such markets down after that epidemic, but never did.

However, it’s likely that the novel coronavirus was transmitted from bats to humans no earlier than October 2019 (the article also says it’s likely some small animal was the intermediary – it probably wasn’t a bat directly biting a human). But new viruses (especially flu viruses) affect humans all the time and quickly die off, because they never reach the critical mass needed to spread very far. What allowed the novel coronavirus to reach that critical mass?

This is where the seafood market was important. It wasn’t because there were live (or dead) fish at the market – it’s because people were packed together very closely there. If not the market, it might have been a packed subway station or a sporting event. It was just luck (luck for the virus, of course, not the rest of us) that the superspreading happened at the market.

And how did the coronavirus get to the market? It was probably just because one person on one day decided to go there. Since so many people infected with the coronavirus are asymptomatic, one person who felt fine just did something they do probably every week or even more often: they went to the seafood market. Or perhaps they felt a little sick and knew they probably shouldn’t go, realizing they might spread the common cold or the flu to a few other people – but they went anyway.

How do we prevent this from happening in the future? Do we need to ban all crowded events of any kind? That’s probably not possible or even desirable. Perhaps it’s requiring some minimal social distancing at all such events – and if that’s not possible, then requiring all participants to wear a mask.

Just one of the many long-lasting changes that might come out of the pandemic.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.