Five years ago this morning on Dec. 31, 2019, I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and my laptop. I was a member of “Flublogia,” a group of journalists, health scientists and kibitzers like me who had been tracking reports of disease outbreaks for years. I started every morning by checking my friends’ sites and Twitter feeds.

News had been slow lately; an Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was fading out. But this morning, several of my friends had picked up a report from Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection about a “cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei province.”

Then Helen Branswell, a Canadian health journalist based in Boston, commented on the Wuhan reports: she didn’t like the sound of them at all. If Branswell was worried, the Flublogia group was instantly alarmed.

I checked Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection website and then went through the media reports from Wuhan. As the day progressed, I posted translated stories from the media in mainland China and Hong Kong, which culminated in the formal declaration of a “pneumonia epidemic” with 27 confirmed cases — seven of them serious.