• Question: Did you expect COVID-19?

    Asked by anon-256872 on 16 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Sarah Montgomery

      Sarah Montgomery answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      I think there were some concerns after the SARS and MERS outbreaks, but personally I never expected a situation like this. Back in January my colleagues and I were discussing going to a conference in Japan, and I thought there was a good chance that flights would be disrupted, but that was all really.

      The problem is there are often warnings about impending disasters like wars, earthquakes, climate change and so on, but it’s very expensive and complicated to prepare adequately. Should everyone move out of Naples now in case the volcano Vesuvius erupts next year? We know it’s a possibility, but estimating how likely it is to happen and how bad it will be is much more difficult.

    • Photo: Nicole Wheeler

      Nicole Wheeler answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      Scientists were aware a deadly virus could spread across the world, and countries had been running simulation exercises to see how well prepared they were. Most countries knew they weren’t prepared enough, but the money that could have gone into preparing for an outbreak like COVID was spent on other problems that the public were more worried about. In terms of our early assessment of SARS-CoV-2, we didn’t initially know that this would be the virus that would spread across the world that we’d been preparing for – information about what was going on and how dangerous the virus was was really limited, and it took us a long time to figure out how contagious the virus was (we’re still unsure how many people have had the virus)

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