It's a mildly chilly, but still pleasant November 2002 morning in China's Guangdong province.
A local farmer tends to his crops when he crosses paths with one of China's most adorable
animals, the masked palm civet.
A weasel-like animal, the masked palm civet is unique to southeast Asia, and ubiquitous
throughout the land- much like the common raccoon in North America.
Unknown to this farmer though, his close encounter with this particular civet has become a deadly
one.
As the farmer breathes in the fresh fall air, a few stray particles work its way into his
lungs.
Hiding amongst those airborne particles are a few viruses, and while these viruses have
infected civets for millenia, today all that is about to change.
With perhaps the world's worst case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, this
Chinese farmer has just breathed in the only known mutation of what will become the SARS
virus that allows it to infect human beings.
From this one stray breath, the world will be rocked by a modern pandemic that will kill
hundreds.
The farmer will be dead in a matter of days, his corpse laid up in the same hospital bed
he had checked himself into after having extreme difficulties breathing.
The virus within him however remained very much alive, even as doctors inspected his
corpse for a cause of death and remained unable to identify one other than mysterious acute
respiratory illness.
The virus would spread from person to person- some it had little to no effect on, and was
written off as a mild flu or cold, others it would prove fatal.
The Chinese government very quickly realized that something was extremely wrong in the
small province outside of Hong Kong.
Sending in government investigators, they quickly realized that they were dealing with
a new, and very contagious disease- yet in a bid to prevent a panic, they refused to
alert the World Health Organization and used their control over the state-run media to
block out any information to the public.
The death toll however continued to rise, and slowly Canada's Global Public Health Intelligence
Network, a global monitoring system that scours media for possible pandemic outbreaks in order
to stop them in their tracks, gathers evidence that something very wrong is happening on
the other side of the Chinese media blackout.
The evidence is slow to be gathered though due to Chinese censorship, and finally on
December 5th, the Canadians have given enough evidence to the World Health Organization
that it submits a formal request for information to the Chinese government.
At first the Chinese Communist Party sits silent, until a second request six days later
is filed.
Canada's Global Public Health Intelligence Network is meant to stop outbreak of diseases
before they become pandemics, and so far it has been very successful, yet there's little
it could have done to stop what came next thanks to Chinese censorship.
At the end of January, a fish seller suffering from acute respiratory problems checked himself
in to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital in Guangzhou.
Before dying, he becomes SARS's first super-spreader, infecting an approximate 30 doctors and nurses
with the strange new disease.
One of those infected would be a doctor named Liu Jianlun, who would go on to spread the
disease to Hong Kong.
And once the disease reached Hong Kong, the worst consequence that the Chinese government
had fought so hard to prevent would come to pass: the mystery disease would go global.
Doctor Jianlun would travel to Hong Kong to attend a family gathering.
As one of the world's most populated cities, Hong Kong offered no shortage of new hosts
for the deadly disease, and as Jianlun fell ill, he had already done his job as a super-spreader.
As Jianlun lay dying in a Hong Kong hospital, the disease was already on its way to Vietnam,
Canada, Taiwan, and beyond.
Before being contained by the end of summer 2003, SARS would infect 8273 people around
the world, killing 775 of them.
This gave the disease a mortality rate of 9.6 percent, making it one of the deadliest
modern epidemics.
These numbers may not seem impressive, but that's only because of the massive global
response to the epidemic, and the incredible efforts of physicians around the world to
discover the disease and quarantine it.
In a way, SARS was a test of humanity's ability to respond to a global pandemic, and had the
disease been more virulent, it's likely we would have failed that test thanks to the
Chinese government's censorship.
The new coronavirus outbreak bears many similarities to SARS, and in fact the two diseases are
in essence the same, as they both come from the same family of coronaviruses.
Yet while mortality rates are still unknown due to a lack of sample size and us still
being in the opening days of a new pandemic, it is clear that the disease is deadly.
Initially only the elderly and young were thought to be at risk, until in mid-January
a perfectly healthy Chinese teenager died from the disease.
In just the last few days alone as we write this script, the death toll has skyrocketed
from 50 to 81, after initially casualties being limited to just a few a day.
This means that the virus is infecting more people faster, and is spreading around the
world at an exponential rate.
If the death toll continues to climb at such an incredible rate, the new Wuhan virus will
be an order of magnitude more lethal than SARS ever was.
Humanity may be facing the first serious risk to global health since the Spanish Flu outbreak
that killed millions after the end of World War I.
While SARS took months to spread from rural China to the rest of the world, the Wuhan
virus was first identified in the major city of Wuhan, and from there in less than a month
since the outbreak began, there are already 40 cases confirmed in a dozen other countries,
with five now here in the United States.
We're more than sure that as the virus continues to spread, by the time this script is live
and you're watching this, all of those figures will have grown exponentially.
While the Wuhan virus attacks the body in much the same way as SARS, it's the ease of
infection that is proving to make it far deadlier than SARS ever was.
China is far more interconnected with the rest of the world than it was in 2002, with
more international airports and flights across the country.
China's rapid modernization has also greatly increased the number of international visitors
to the interior parts of the country, as opposed to just the major port cities as was the case
back in 2002.
Basically, China is far more connected to the world than it ever was, and while it was
quick to alert the World Health Organization this time over its latest outbreak, there
was little that could be done before the disease was already on its way to the rest of the
world.
To contain the outbreak, China has increased the number of quarantined cities from 13,
to 17, a move that affects over 50 million Chinese citizens.
The government has mobilized both the civilian medical community and its military in a massive
undertaking to fight the spread of the virus, and two brand new hospitals are being built
at a rapid pace in two of the worst affected zones, set to be completed in a matter of
weeks.
In the US, cases have been confirmed in California, Arizona, Illinois, Washington state, and Texas.
Dozens of cities across the nation are now screening patients who are showing symptoms
that are consistent with those of the Wuhan virus.
As of this writing, two new patients in Virginia are believed to be infected.
Europe has not been spared the virus, and recently two cases were confirmed in France.
Just hours after the initial report, a third case was confirmed.
Though the list continues to grow daily, confirmed Wuhan virus cases have come from Thailand,
Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Nepal, Malaysia, France, the US, and Australia.
What makes the Wuhan virus especially dangerous is the fact that it is contagious even during
its incubation period, unlike the SARS virus.
This means that the virus can still infect people even before the carrier is showing
any symptoms, something that makes identifying and quarantining the virus early on almost
impossible.
As it takes up to two weeks for an infected carrier to start feeling sick, that person
could be spreading the disease around them for fourteen days before realizing that they've
been infected.
This was impossible with SARS, which was not contagious during its incubation period, and
makes the Wuhan virus a far greater threat than SARS ever was.
As the world moves to contain the disease, the American CDC has been working on a field
test that can diagnose the virus early on, and it hopes to be able to export the equipment
soon to the rest of the world.
What is clear is that we're all in this together, and petty national differences have thankfully
been set aside as the world gears up to stop the death toll from the Wuhan virus from climbing
any higher.