For many Canadian infectious disease experts, the first inkling of the new coronavirus came in a New Year’s Eve email from the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases.
The program, called ProMED for short, usually sends out multiple daily alerts, with updates on infections impacting humans, animals and agriculture.
The email blast in question had a line about pneumonia patients in Wuhan, China. There was, as Dr. Zain Chagla remembers it, “eerie references to SARS,” but also some suggestion that it might be Legionnaires — a severe type of pneumonia you can get from bacteria in water or soil.
Even after it was clearly a coronavirus, Chagla says there was “initial fear but calm given this seemed localized.” We know now, it’s not.