JONATHAN M. METSCH, Dr.P.H. – Tracking Emerging Public Health Challenges – October 19, 2026 – COVID
Ms. Branswell “saw the pandemic coming well before anyone was paying attention,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator in 2022 and 2023, posted on social media after her death.
Reporting at the time for STAT, the medical and science news site, she posted on Twitter on New Year’s Eve 2019 about a report of “unexplained pneumonia” in China, saying, “Hopefully this is nothing out of the ordinary.” Two days later, she posted a South China Morning Post article about the outbreak and wrote, with more concern, “Not liking the looks of this.””
On Jan. 4, STAT published her first article on the “growing cluster” of unexplained pneumonia cases, in which she noted the possibility of “a new virus and perhaps even a new coronavirus.” By the end of March, Ms. Branswell had written about 50 articles about the pandemic. (1)
Then the first POST of what became TRACKING EMERGING PUBLIC HEALTH CHALLENGES
PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
And the last POST 30 months later…
POST 268. August 23, 2022. PANDEMICS. “The Covid-19 pandemic has been a lesson in speed — the speed at which a novel virus among humans can spread, the speed at which it can rack up fatalities and cripple economies, the speed at which vaccines can be designed and produced, the speed at which misinformation can undermine public health. Amid all that rapidity is a different kind of speed, which drives the rest, like an engine spinning the cars on a nauseating carnival ride: the speed of viral evolution…”
1.A Reporter Who Saw Covid Coming Has Died, by By Jeré Longman, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/17/health/helen-branswell-dead.html
curated by Jonathan M. Metsch, Dr.P.H.
Clinical Professor of Environmental Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai