Claire Reilly: A mysterious virus
an unexplained illness.
Claire Reilly: An early outbreak that swept across the world.
In 2020, the threat of a global pandemic suddenly became a
reality.
And the world was completely caught off guard.
We've faced disease outbreaks before.
SARS, Zika, Ebola.
But what happens when a virus gets out of control and goes
global?
We're on a mission to show you the cutting edge science and
technology, that could help us fight back
When we started working on this series in 2019, we set out to
learn everything we could about pandemics.
Back then the idea of a terrifying global outbreak felt
like the stuff of science fiction.
Our best defense has been social distancing.
But we wanted to speak to the world's leading experts
to find out what it would look like in real life.
And before long, one thing was clear.
It wasn't a matter of if, but when.
Eric Toner: Another one will happen sometime. We just don't
know when.
Unknown: Well, the Coronavirus has now spread to nearly 100
countries and territories.
Claire Reilly: The entire country has now been placed
under lockdown.
The World Health Organization officially characterized the
COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic today.
When the new Coronavirus first hit China, doctors didn't know
what they were looking at.
China went into lockdown to try and contain the virus but It was
too late.
Cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by this new Coronavirus,
started appearing around the world.
The Coronavirus quickly drew comparisons to the great flu
pandemic of 1918.
Back then one third of the human population was infected.
And over the course of two years 50 to 100 million people died.
I got a taste of what that dark time was like at the Mutter
Museum in Philadelphia.
According to historian Robert Hicks, patients could go from
feeling healthy
to being dead in a matter of hours.
Robert Hicks: It is not a pretty picture, headaches, fatigue,
maybe loss of appetite.
In the severe cases where it became lethal, the skin might
start to turn blue
The lung disintegration would sound like something crunching.
So if you take bubble wrap and crunch it in your hands,
you're getting that popping sensation that you might hear
from a
flu victim on the way out.
Claire Reilly: While the world has seen epidemics before,
historians and health experts still don't completely
understand why this one hits so hard.
Robert Hicks: Nobody knows why the flu pandemic was so
catastrophic.
There'd been flu before the word had been in common usage, and it
meant specific symptoms.
It didn't mean just a bad cold, which is the way some people
talk about it now,
but it meant a very serious debilitating disease that one
soldier who got it in World War One said it was like being
clubbed with a big wooden mallet all the time.
Can it happen now?
Yes, will it happen in the future?
The experts say it's just a matter of time.
Claire Reilly: But how can the world possibly prepare for a
global disaster if we don't know it's coming?
Back in 2019, we met with Dr. Eric toner from the Johns
Hopkins Center for Health Security.
He's one of the world's leading experts in pandemics,
and he knows what it takes to fight a disease on a global
scale.
What takes us from a couple of outbreaks of people having the
sniffles to a massive pandemic?
Eric Toner: All epidemics tend to start slowly. It's one person
infecting a couple of other people
who infect a couple of more people.
And so it builds very slowly until we almost always missed
the beginning of an epidemic.
Claire Reilly: Is there a chance that we could be caught off
guard by some sort of horrible mutant bat influenza or
something like that?
Eric Toner: Yes, and we probably will be.
That's, that's the nature of these things.
We had no idea about something like SARS. We had no idea about
MERS we had no idea about Zika.
We have no idea what's gonna pop up next, but we have systems in
place that we can see it where it pops up first.
So it gives us a little bit of time to prepare,
if we don't happen to be unlucky enough to be in the city where
It first appeared.
Unknown: Coronavirus began in China several months ago. And
since then the virus and fear of it have been spreading around
the world.
Claire Reilly: So I'm here in my apartment and in the few months
it's been since we interviewed Eric Toner, things have totally
changed.
The whole of San Francisco where I am is on a city wide lockdown,
meaning we can't leave our houses unless it's for essential
work or travel.
People working from home and everyone is kind of scared. So
in this context, I wanted to catch up with Eric Toner again
and find out just what we're facing. Now that we're in this
new world order of a global Coronavirus pandemic.
Eric Toner: This is unlike anything we've seen before. And
there is no way to completely stop this. It can't be
contained. It can only be slowed down.
Claire Reilly: When did you first realize that this was
going to be so serious?
Eric Toner: Well, sometime in mid to late January, it started
to become obvious that this was something that was unprecedented
in our lifetimes.
This is going to end up being a truly historic, historically bad
event.
Claire Reilly: The Coronavirus is covered in lots of tiny spike
proteins.
These spikes attached to receptors in our lungs and
create openings in the cell walls.
The virus injects its genetic material into the cell and takes
over,
forcing the cell to make more and more copies of the virus.
The cell explodes and shoots out thousands more virus particles
Eric Toner: Our lungs becoming inflamed. They swell, they fill
with fluid
and in severe cases end up
killing people because they their lungs fail.
Claire Reilly: But there is hope.
Researchers are working on a way to transfer immunity,
helping people fight the virus before they even get sick.
At the Vanderbilt vaccine center in Nashville, Tennessee,
scientists analyzing the blood of patients who've recovered
from COVID-19.
The researchers are looking for antibodies,
tiny proteins made by white blood cells.
When a patient is infected with Coronavirus, their white blood
cells create these antibodies to fight the virus.
The antibodies bind with the viruses spike proteins,
stopping them from penetrating human cells and effectively
neutralizing the virus.
Some antibodies work better than others.
That's what the team at Vanderbilt is looking for,
the antibodies that are the best at hunting down and neutralizing
the virus.
Once they're isolated, they can be grown in a lab,
and given to other patients to boost their immunity.
And the best part, it could lead to a treatment by the end of
2020.
A medication that could be given to high risk people before they
get Coronavirus.
But analyzing blood samples isn't the only way to find virus
killers.
Down the road from Vanderbilt at the University of Tennessee's
Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
a team of researchers is trying to find existing drugs that
could fight Coronavirus,
and they're doing it with the help of the world's most
powerful supercomputer.
The researchers simulated the virus on Summit, a supercomputer
developed for the laboratory by IBM.
In the simulations they pitted the virus against drugs that are
already available.
They wanted to see if the drug molecule could bind to the virus
to stop it sticking to human cells.
Using the immense computing power of summit,
they found 76 70 drug compounds that might just work.
Fighting a global pandemic is not a short battle.
This research takes time.
But unlike a century ago, when the world was blindsided by
influenza,
this time, we've got technology on our side.
Eric Toner: Technology has really revolutionized our
response to this,
being able to communicate around the world in real time.
Technology is revolutionizing the way in which we can make
drugs and vaccines to do it much faster than we could ever do it
before.
Claire Reilly: Many of the ways we can fight a pandemic haven't
changed in centuries:
Self isolation, quarantine.
All really low-fi ways of stopping the spread.
But in 2020 and beyond, it's reassuring to know that
technology can give us an edge