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Yeah, when did you first hear about what was happening in Wuhan with this outbreak?

Oh, I know exactly when it was New Year's Eve. It was during the day.

This is Peter Daschak. He's a zoologist. Lives in New York, works in China.

We were following rumors on the internet in China about this outbreak. And I got these translated

internet sites that were saying, not only is it a new

virus, it's a coronavirus. So I think people knew back then. Coronavirus is one of Peter's

areas of expertise. He's been studying how infections, like this new one, COVID-19, move.

They start out in an animal, like, say a bat. Then they jump the way this one did.

You know, the minute we got the sequence that was released, we quickly matched that up and showed

that it was a bat virus. And not only that, it's very close to the group we've been working on.

So, you know, your emotion then is excitement in a way because this is exactly what you've

been saying is going to happen and then fear that our lives are going to be, you know,

turned upside down and people are going to die, which is exactly what's happening right now.

If you were looking at this coronavirus outbreak and seeing a game of whack-a-mole,

with doctors all around the world urgently trying to quash this virus,

Peter, he sees it differently.

He sees a game of chess with patterns and predictability.

A few years back, Peter was working with the World Health Organization, plotting out what the next global pandemic could look like.

When he and some other scientists came up with the idea of Disease X, disease X would hit this kind of epidemiological sweet spot.

It would transmit easily from person to person.

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