Why the coronavirus puzzle still hasn't been solved
On a hot August evening in 1854, the tailor at 40 Broad Street in London's Soho district felt a strange rumble through his stomach. A growling portent of doom. Over the next 24 hours, his skin turned a dark blue, stiffened and dried out. Within two days, he was dead.
The tailor -- Mr. G, as history has dubbed him -- was one of the first to fall victim to a terrifying epidemic of cholera that ripped through Soho in the mid-19th century.
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The mighty task of uncovering the origins of the Soho outbreak fell to a man named John Snow (not that Jon Snow). After conducting interviews with family members of the deceased in collaboration with a local priest, Snow, a respected anesthetist, plotted a map of cholera cases around the neighborhood. His dashboard of cases helped pinpoint the source of Soho's misery: a contaminated water pump installed just outside the tailor's house.
Nearly 170 years later, the world is grappling with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The disease has resulted in a worldwide health calamity on a scale completely unseen on the streets of west London. Over 5 million people have been infected, with global deaths topping 350,000. But as in 1854, one of the greatest mysteries of the coronavirus pandemic is where, exactly, it began.
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"The search for the origin is incredibly important to prevent reemergence of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses," says Alina Chan, a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Without knowing the origin of disease, there's a likelihood it could strike again, wreaking more havoc.
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