--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Exactly one year ago today, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Think about everything we've been through in the U.S. this past year. School closings, mask mandates, the constant anxiety, and the unthinkable human toll.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And when you think back to those early days, your timeline likely begins sometime around March, right? But there were some people out there who saw this coming weeks, even months before the rest of us.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This time last year, I'd already been in it for two months. That's Helen Branswell. She's a senior writer at the health publication Stat. And in January 2020, while COVID wasn't even in our vocabulary, for Helen, it was the only thing on her mind.
--:-- Helen Branswell: To be honest, there were a few days I had a hard time getting out of bed because I was just like, oh, this is just so big and this is going to be so bad.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Helen specializes in covering infectious diseases and global health. She's been doing this work since the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto. But nothing, nothing in her career has been like COVID.
--:-- Helen Branswell: One of the earliest signs it was going to be bad was on January 23rd, 2020. That's when the city of Wuhan locked down. That was a very, very clear signal that they had a huge problem.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Nobody puts an entire city of 11 million people on lockdown if you can help it. I mean, it's just such an extraordinary measure.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think a couple of days after that, I was having a conversation with a scientist, Trevor Bedford. He studies the genetic sequences of pathogens to sort of try to estimate how long they've been spreading and where they've been spreading from.
--:-- Helen Branswell: Helen says at the time, Dr. Bedford thought there was only around 13 known cases outside of China. That is until she broke the news to him.
--:-- Helen Branswell: And I said, oh, no, actually, you know, they've revised the number. It's now 40.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And he cursed like it was completely involuntary. It was just something that I can't say here.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I could hear him trying to calculate what that meant and trying not just to calculate the number, but take in that the spread outside of China was already probably quite a bit bigger than he had thought just a second or two before.
--:-- Helen Branswell: And then he said, you know, if that's the case, then I have a hard time seeing how this isn't going to be a pandemic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wow. And that was kind of a buckle up moment. It was a buckle up moment in more ways than one. It just signaled to Helen and people like Dr Bedford that we were on track to see a pandemic forming. It was also an early sign for us here in the United States to get ready, a warning of what was to come.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It wasn't very politically correct in the United States, or at least it wasn't an accepted point of view. But there were people who were acknowledging that China bought the world time. We should have used it better, but they bought the world time by taking the actions that they did in Wuhan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So why do you think American leaders were so slow to recognize that? It was very puzzling.
--:-- Helen Branswell: And when you say America's leaders, I mean, some of America's leaders never acknowledged that China bought the world time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In March and April when the United States and the rest of the outside world understood what they were up against. There was still a lot of criticism of China. There was much more discussion about what China had unleashed on the world than buying the world time.
--:-- Helen Branswell: But I spent a lot of February of 2020 really puzzled by how slowly everybody seemed to be moving and how people were trying to act like everything was normal almost.
--:-- Shamita Basu: About two weeks later, on February 11th, Helen was moderating a panel at the Aspen Institute. There was a whole lot of big hitters from the world of public health there, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and a CDC official named Dr. Nancy Messonnier.
--:-- Helen Branswell: And, you know, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Messonnier were kind of playing down the situation. Dr. Fauci said something to the effect of, you know, the risk to Americans is low.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And I just said, why do you say that? How can you say that? There isn't a force field around China. It's not going to stop there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Again, it's the message. When you say the long range, low risk right now, should they be frightened about what's going on? Right now, we have 13 people. They're in identification, isolation and contact tracing.
--:-- Helen Branswell: I pressed them into the point where Dr. Fauci said, what do you want me to say? Could it be a pandemic? Of course it could be a pandemic. Is there a risk that this is going to turn into a global pandemic? Absolutely, yes, there is.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But, you know, we don't know yet that it's going to be. I couldn't understand it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I eventually said this virus is going to do exactly the same thing outside of China as it did inside of China.
--:-- Helen Branswell: And both he and Dr. Messonnier talked about the fact that, well, we are not seeing it take off in the explosive way that it did in China. We're watching, but for now, we do think that the risk is low.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I just want to add that I know because you been asking me this question for a couple weeks and I think the thing to think about in the U is there only so much worrying that you can do every day right
--:-- Helen Branswell: What would it be Helen if we got up and said OK hi this is Nancy and I telling you we're really, really got a big risk of getting completely wiped out. And then nothing happens. Then your credibility is gone.
--:-- Shamita Basu: American officials were not the only ones initially downplaying how bad this could get.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I talked to a scientist I know, somebody from Canada, who'd been at a meeting at the World Health Organization in that period, sort of about the third week of February.
--:-- Helen Branswell: And he said that all the Asian scientists who were at this meeting were nervous as hell. They were just literally sort of thrumming in their chairs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But he said, you know, the Europeans were all like, oh, it's not going to come here.
--:-- Helen Branswell: So it wasn't just American leaders. I think that there was sort of willful blindness almost that hopefully this wasn't going to turn into what it turned into.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Helen says this was the window to take action. At this point in mid-February, COVID-19 had only infected about 67,000 people and only about 1,500 people had died around the world.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The United States had an opportunity to try to get ahead of this. But then... Ten days later, 12 days later, first Iran and then Italy had explosive outbreaks, large numbers of cases.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it became very clear then that the virus did exactly the same thing outside of China that it did in China. And soon it would hit the United States.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There were outbreaks in Seattle, New York, and we were completely unprepared.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The United States was almost out of personal protective equipment before the pandemic was declared a pandemic. That's clearly a problem.
--:-- Helen Branswell: this time last year, doctors and nurses and hospitals were talking about being given one N95 respirator a week and having to carry it around in a paper bag and only pull it out to put it on when they were seeing a patient that they thought might have COVID and the rest of the time walking around with a surgical mask, which is supposed to be discarded after one use that they were using for days.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, this pandemic has pointed out so many weaknesses, and it won't be the last one.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Alan, public health officials, they often talk about the big one in terms of pandemics.
--:-- Helen Branswell: I know you've interviewed Michael Ryan, the head of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Program.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He said that this is not necessarily the big one. If we face another pandemic again bigger are we prepared?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well no The reality is I don't think you ever going to be fully prepared
--:-- Helen Branswell: Could we be better prepared Absolutely
--:-- Shamita Basu: Has this experience shown us how poorly prepared we were? Sure.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I mean, I hope that we all sort of have the wherewithal to remember what went wrong and fix it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What happens often after something like this is there will be a couple of reports done, there'll be scathing, but everybody will go back to what they were doing before and we don't learn the lessons of this pandemic.
--:-- Helen Branswell: That would be a horrible thing. That would be tragic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And what about this past year? What are you thinking after 12 months have passed since the World Health Organization declared this a pandemic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You hopeful?
--:-- Helen Branswell: I'm tired. Am I hopeful? Yeah, I am hopeful.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, we are in just an extraordinarily fortunate situation right now.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I mean, this time last year, when leaders of the United States, people like Dr. Fauci and people in the administration, started talking about developing vaccines in a very short period of time, I told everybody who would listen, that's not going to happen.
--:-- Helen Branswell: It takes a long time to develop vaccines. And I was wrong. And hallelujah.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are in a place now where the United States has three authorized vaccines. And that is just absolutely extraordinary.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Thank you so much, Helen, for your excellent reporting and for being on Apple News today.
--:-- Helen Branswell: Well, thank you for having me, Duarte.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tomorrow, Duarte and I are teaming up. Together, we interview Alexis Madrigal. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-founder of the COVID-19 Tracking Project.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Alexis told us that early on in the pandemic, he and his team identified a major weakness in the federal government's COVID-19 response. Reliable data. This is the grandest failure of the whole thing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Everybody in the federal and state governments and all public health infrastructure, all pandemic preparedness planning assumes a base layer of good data.
--:-- Helen Branswell: And it turned out to be just this crucial, crucial problem.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We'll talk to you again tomorrow.
