New Year’s Eve 2019: Ian Lipkin, a famed Columbia University epidemiologist, is having dinner with his wife and a fellow scientist. He gets a confidential phone call from a highly placed source in China: There’s a cluster of pneumonia-like illnesses in the city of Wuhan caused by a novel coronavirus. The source says it’s not that big a deal: It doesn’t look very transmissible.
“I was told not to worry about it,” Lipkin recalls.
It was something to worry about. Continue reading.