I feel like COVID was a fever dream. If I had to describe my 2020 life to someone today, I would sound unhinged: I stayed inside for three years, bleached my groceries, drove 3 hours to get a vaccine, and only socialized in micropods. It sounds like a horror movie…because it genuinely was one. Millions of people died worldwide and most Americans know someone who was hospitalized or killed by the virus. It was a global trauma that we lived through together, and we have barely talked about it since.
I bring this up because the whole thing started with a cluster of pneumonia cases that nobody could explain. So when I saw that a young, otherwise healthy, woman at a plague research lab in Russia had died of pneumonia with no confirmed cause, it had my spidey senses tingling.
Some context on who’s writing this: we are epidemiologists. We are naturally skeptical and, okay, sometimes hypochondriacs. That’s the burden of knowing more about disease transmission than we ever wanted to. (I will never set foot on a cruise ship again after reading a norovirus case study once in grad school and learning that it took out almost the entire boat in less than 12 hours.) That said, one thing a public health degree teaches you is that new outbreaks don’t typically come in hot. They usually simmer, starting as an isolated case or small cluster of cases that are picked up by public health surveillance and somebody decides to look into which brings us to Russia.
On October 2, Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old laboratory worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia, died after developing severe pneumonia. Russian authorities quarantined about 200 people who had been in contact with her, but Russia’s national public health agency reported that her autopsy didn’t detect plague and that her contacts tested negative for any dangerous pathogens. Ok, so what killed Darya? Her official cause of death is “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” which doesn’t answer the question. They haven’t said what she actually died from and this is a problem.
Continue reading over at the Women in America Substack.
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