The SARS Case Study: An Alarm Clock?

The COVID‐19 pandemic: some lessons learned about crisis preparedness and management, and the need for international benchmarking to reduce deficits

“…It is well known that experts have been warning of impending deadly epi/pandemics, including coronavirus outbreaks, for a long time (e.g., Turinici and Danchin, 2007;Ge et al, 2013;Menachery et al, 2015; https:// www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_ not_ready?language=en; Editorial (2016) Predicting pandemics, Lancet DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736 (16)32578-8; https://apps.who.int/gpmb/assets/annual_ report/GPMB_annualreport_2019.pdf; https://www. weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/a-visual-history-ofpandemics/).…”

“…It is well known that experts have been warning of impending deadly epi/pandemics, including coronavirus outbreaks, for a long time (e.g., Turinici and Danchin, ; Ge et al ., ; Menachery et al ., ; https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?language=en; Editorial (2016) Predicting pandemics, Lancet DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)32578-8 ; https://apps.who.int/gpmb/assets/annual_report/GPMB_annualreport_2019.pdf; https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/a-visual-history-of-pandemics/). Now while the nature, evolution, timing and source of novel emerging infectious agents is uncertain, pandemics are always counteracted by the same time‐honoured strategy: interruption of infection chains and anticipation of a surge in need for treatment of acute disease (here, we are nearly in the same situation as in the world confronted by Spanish flu in 1918).…”

Cytosine drives evolution of SARS‐CoV‐2

“…In this article, we show, in the specific case of SARS-CoV-2, that the role of cytosine-based metabolites used as cell growth coordinators is central to understanding both innate antiviral immunity and the evolution of the virus. An outbreak of atypical pneumonia, first noticed in Wuhan, Hubei province, China (Huang et al, 2020), developed into the COVID-19 pandemic (Jee, 2020) that displayed alarming similarities to symptoms caused by other β-coronaviruses (β-CoVs), SARS (Turinici and Danchin, 2007) and MERS (Bermingham et al, 2012) in particular. To contain the epidemic, efforts have been placed on diagnostic (Udugama et al, 2020), epidemiology (Park et al, 2020), vaccines (Zhang et al, 2020) and exploration of the use of old drugs to act as anticoronaviral drugs (Du and Chen, 2020).…”

“…An outbreak of atypical pneumonia, first noticed in Wuhan, Hubei province, China (Huang et al ., ), developed into the COVID‐19 pandemic (Jee, ) that displayed alarming similarities to symptoms caused by other β‐coronaviruses (β‐CoVs), SARS (Turinici and Danchin, ) and MERS (Bermingham et al ., ) in particular. To contain the epidemic, efforts have been placed on diagnostic (Udugama et al ., ), epidemiology (Park et al ., ), vaccines (Zhang et al ., ) and exploration of the use of old drugs to act as anti‐coronaviral drugs (Du and Chen, ).…”

Scientific Foundations

“…Continuing previous works in epidemiology, a review paper [36] on the SARS epidemic was delivered and is scheduled for publication in 2007. A numerical investigation concerning a hypothesis on the propagation of the TSE epidemics has also been proposed [28].…”