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 \u201cFlublogia,\u201d 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\u2019 sites and Twitter feeds.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Centre for Health Protection about a \u201ccluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei province.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then Helen Branswell, a Canadian health journalist based in Boston, commented on the Wuhan reports: she didn\u2019t like the sound of them at all. If Branswell was worried, the Flublogia group was instantly alarmed.<\/p>\n
I checked Hong Kong\u2019s 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 \u201cpneumonia epidemic\u201d with 27 confirmed cases \u2014 seven of them serious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u201cFlublogia,\u201d 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\u2019 sites and Twitter feeds.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Centre for Health Protection about a \u201ccluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei province.\u201d<\/p>\n