(04.Aug 2022)

It might seem unlikely that a once-in-a-generation event happened twice within the space of a couple of weeks, but actually, says Wertheim, once all the conditions were in place—a zoonotic virus capable of human infection in close proximity to humans—it would have been surprising if it had only happened once. The barriers to spillover had been lowered. “We failed to climb Mount Everest for thousands of years, and then in one day two people did,” says Andersen.