AFTER NEARLY A YEAR, living under a pandemic which has come to color every aspect of daily life, it’s easy to forget that the whole thing arose rather quietly. In early January, news broke of an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, and began to trickle out to an international audience. On January 11, Chinese authorities announced that a 61-year-old was the first person to die in the outbreak, which had been raging for at least a month. On the same day, Chinese researchers released a draft genome sequence of the pathogen they believed was causing those illnesses—a new coronavirus.