A Free Email Service Broke the News of the Coronavirus in 2019
ProMED had previously spotted outbreaks of MERS, Zika, and Ebola
The rumors first surfaced on WeChat and Weibo. Users of the Chinese social media platforms were saying a pneumonia-like illness had hit Wuhan — and that it was killing people. Staff at EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit that monitors emerging diseases, noticed this chatter in late December 2019.
Peter Daszak, president of the organization, combed through the material himself, popping paragraphs into Google Translate and getting back imperfect translations. Colleagues who spoke Chinese also helped him figure out what was going on.
“Clearly something was out there,” he told OneZero. “There was a lot of very contentious and often dramatic discussion.”
By New Year’s Eve, Daszak had gathered information that he thought was worth flagging to ProMED-mail, a service that sends out free regular alerts about disease outbreaks around the world to more than 83,000 email subscribers, many of them epidemiologists and public health experts.
When Daszak went to tell ProMED about what he’d found, he realized they had beaten him to it. On December 30, ProMED staff sent out an alert citing an urgent notice from Wuhan about an “unexplained…
