The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic could have been lessened if governments had paid attention to scientists, science writer David Quammen told CNN in a coronavirus town hall on Thursday.
Quammen, author of the 2012 book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, answered questions about the pandemic from CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta on the program.
Cooper noted that Quammen had written that the next great pandemic would be “strange, unfamiliar, but it won’t come from outer space. Odds are that the killer pathogen, most likely a virus, will spill over to humans from a nonhuman animal.”
“The scientists knew about this,” Quammen said. “The only reason I predicted it in Spillover in 2012 was because I was listening to a select group of shrewd infectious-disease scientists, and they were saying, it’s coming, it will be a virus out of an animal, possibly a bat, possibly a coronavirus or an influenza, because they evolve quickly, possibly in a place like a wet market.”
Gupta noted that the SARS outbreak of the early 21st century paled in comparison to the COVID-19 pandemic, asking Quammen, “Did something go right there that didn’t go right here, or did we get lucky?”
“We got lucky because that virus was not as transmissible as this one,” Quammen responded. “It didn’t have, as far as we know, silent spread, asymptomatic people shedding the virus while they walked around feeling healthy.”
Asked by Cooper what he hoped the world learns from the COVID-19 pandemic, Quammen said that people need to learn lessons from the “deep causes” of the disease.
“We’re disrupting the wild ecosystems of the earth, and as we do that, we’re coming in contact with these wild animals that carry all these viruses,” he said. “As long as we keep doing that, we’re going to be facing these spillovers and these outbreaks in the future.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
