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How Coronavirus went from Exclusive To Everywhere
And when the small Toronto company BlueDot Global sounded the alarm
On the last day of 2019, one sole member of the BlueDot Global surveillance team was on duty working the holiday when she came across a short article in a Chinese business newspaper. It referenced an unusual pneumonia-like virus that had no known origin, which had just emerged in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.
So much for pulling the quiet shift.
The analyst got right to it and penned an internal memo to colleagues first, raising her concern….should we be concerned about this? BlueDot CEO Kamran Khan and his team quickly realized that, yes, it was concerning, and fired off an automated notice that was sent out to all BlueDot clients, followed by some sector-specific information to certain clients, all on that same day, making it the last communication for the year 2019.
The clients of BlueDot Global would have received this communication ahead of the WHO, who would would issue their warning on 5 January, 2020, under their banner for Emergency Preparedness Response, that as of January 4, 2020, there were 44 reported cases of “a reported cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology (PUE) with possible links to [a live market],” further noting that they had been informed of these cases on the 29 December, 2019. This was also done well before the US Centre for Disease Control along with the Health Action Network (HAN) issued their memo recognizing a “reported cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology” on January 8, 2020, and then the CDC issued a Level One Travel Warning for China.
Dr Kamran Khan had sort of seen this before —what would become a pandemic, but at first just looked like a concerning spike in patients with something ‘new.’ At the time, he was working as an ER doctor at a hospital in 2003, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, when the SARS pandemic swept through this city. As a doctor who dealt with the crush of what a pandemic looks like inside the hospital system, and had watched some of his colleagues die of SARS, he surmised there must be a better way of doing things. He thought there should be a way to see these coming… and from there he went on to found his company BlueDot in his home city of Toronto.
