text: As the night slipped in, Dr. Alyson Kelvin put down her glass of wine and closed her book. Ready for sleep, she reached to turn off her light and, like so many of us, decided instead to check her email one last time. At 11:59 p.m. on December 30, she had received an alert from the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, or ProMED-mail, a free email service with over eighty thousand subscribers—the same service from which Allen received her January 3 alert. Kelvin, who is a virologist at Dalhousie University and the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, jokingly calls it "a social network for infectious disease researchers." Started in 1994, and run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases, the global listserv has been the first to report on SARS, MERS, Ebola, and Zika outbreaks. Because the open-access service also tracks potential toxins and emerging diseases in animals and plants, however, not every notice is so dire. Kelvin points to one email from Russia about a fungus outbreak in radishes, dryly noting why she doesn't read every alert. But this one—featuring a broken English translation from a Chinese news site, emailed under the subject line "Undiagnosed pneumonia, China"—caught her attention.
  
  ProMED editors warned that the social media chatter surrounding the virus sounded eerily similar to the early reports that swirled around SARS. "Returning to the rumor mill," read the email, archly noting an absence of concrete information, "the discussion of this outbreak involves an 'atypical pneumonia.' " The estimated case count was "apparently" twenty-seven, a rapid-fire, perverse connect-the-dots that happened in a matter of days, weeks at most. Kelvin was alarmed: if so many people were hospitalized, the pathogen must be severe. How many others were sick but not at the hospital? She wasn't ready to wave the pandemic flag, but she did want to know more. Kelvin forwarded the email to her father, David, who is also an infectious-disease researcher at Dalhousie and who had established a lab in the Guangdong province of China in 2003 after the SARS outbreak. His response the next day was brief: "Interesting." And, it was. The word dangerous would come later.
  
  Though Kelvin had hoped for more, the new pneumonia-like virus wasn't yet on her father's radar—it was hardly on anyone's radar in Canada during the first party-hangover days of 2020. But Kelvin couldn't let it go, especially as more people were hospitalized. She reasoned that they couldn't all have gone to the wet market in Wuhan and interacted with the same species, even if that's where the virus originated. It seemed much more likely that, despite assurances otherwise, the unknown virus could spread through human-to-human contact. If that were true, she worried the global consequences of a spillover could be catastrophic. Her lab at Dalhousie was not equipped to study such deadly pathogens, so she reached out to the University of Saskatchewan's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization—International Vaccine Centre. More commonly known as VIDO-InterVac, the sprawling lab is a world leader in vaccine research and development. She asked them, "Do you have the virus? Can you get it?"
  
  The new virus wasn't yet a blaring-red warning for VIDO, either. But Kelvin pushed, and researchers there acquiesced. Before Canada even had its first case, the lab had their permits in place to work on the virus if—when—it arrived. In the meantime, Kelvin began writing research grants to fund what she saw as the inevitable work she would undertake on SARS-CoV-2. It was mid-January, and she kept having to rewrite the sentence charting the global case count. Every time the numbers went up, she'd reopen the document, delete the number, type in a new one. January 23: 570. January 30: 7,818. January 31: 9,800. Delete, replace, delete, replace, do it again. As she wrote, she also planned her trip to VIDO, ticking off each step in the complicated clearing process. Background check, done. Supplies gathered, done. Eventually, the only thing left to do was wait. And then came the call from Public Health Ontario: Sunnybrook had the country's first case, and Mubareka had agreed to share her sample with VIDO. On February 24, Kelvin, her graduate student, Magen Francis, and a technician got on a plane.
  
  If early 2020 felt like a storm to Mubareka, to Kelvin it felt like walking down a long, pitch-dark hallway, the only light shining straight at your feet. You could guess your way forward but never know every direction, what was beyond your own private circle of dusk, or how far you had left to go. It wasn't impossible for her to imagine a pandemic; she knew as she packed her suitcase in February that March would look different. People would not be hollering, shoulder-to-shoulder, in crowded stadiums. They would likely not be jet-setting on spring vacations. But as for how bad it would get, and how far it would spread—she had no idea. The unpredictability terrified her, especially as a mother of two young daughters. Initially, she followed her plan to stay at VIDO for three and a half weeks, studying the virus and beginning work on a vaccine, and to then return home. By that time, the world had plunged into the dark hallway alongside her.
  
  The WHO declared COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic on March 11, not long before Kelvin's flight back to Halifax. She stayed home for a week before hopping back on the plane. "I realized even before I left that I needed to come back," she said. "I needed to continue." So she checked into a hotel with a small kitchenette, hung up her clothes, discovered her favourite takeout. Just four more weeks, she thought. Another month and then she'd have done enough research into how the virus transmitted. She'd have answered her questions about why men seemed so much more susceptible than women to severe disease symptoms and hospitalizations. She'd know the life cycle of the virus, what it did to the body, and when. And in knowing all that, she'd know how to stop it from taking over a body, infecting its cells, waging war at the molecular level. She'd have done enough to help VIDO develop a vaccine. Except COVID-19 proved remarkably elusive, evading answers, patterns, logic. The first month passed. Then, the second. Then another and another and another.