Kai KupferschmidtScience's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.By pure chance, Linfa Wang, one of the world’s foremost experts on emerging viruses, was in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January.
The biologist was visiting collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) just as SARS-CoV-2 was starting to spread from the city to the rest of the world.
Even among those experts there was little fear then. “I was mixing with all the lab people,” Wang says. “We would go to a restaurant every night.”Only when he left on 18 January did he realize how serious the situation was.