The Life and Death of Juan Sanabria, One of New York City’s First Coronavirus Victims →

Jonathan Blitzer, writing for The New Yorker:

At 860 Grand Concourse, a residential apartment building in the Bronx, the doorman’s post is just inside the front door, on a landing between two flights of stairs. One of them leads up to the offices of a dentist and a lawyer, who, along with several physicians, rent commercial space. The other goes down past two pairs of gold-painted columns and into the main lobby, where an elevator services seven floors with a hundred and eleven apartments. Tuesday through Saturday, between eight in the morning and five in the evening, tenants going down to or coming up from the lobby could expect a greeting from a trim, punctilious man with close-cropped hair. He wore a navy-blue uniform that hung loosely off his narrow shoulders. His name was Juan Sanabria.

I’ve got a weird fixation with doormen (those who know me well know that I’m sitting on a novel that features a doorman as one of the main characters) and this piece perfectly encapsulates how special they can be, not only to their friends and family, but to tenants in their orbit. I’ve read a lot of COVID pieces these past ten months; this is one of my favorites.

Did the Coronavirus Escape From a Lab? (The Lab-Leak Hypothesis) →

Nicholson Baker, writing for New York:

I. Flask Monsters

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.

There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap — no written confession, no incriminating notebook, no official accident report. Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.

Nevertheless, I think it’s worth offering some historical context for our yearlong medical nightmare.

This 12,500-word piece is, theoretically, speculative. But it is thorough, and thoughtful, and seeks to uncover “the truth” with no ulterior motive; it only exists to better understand how we wound up where we are right now—with over 372,000 dead Americans, and all applicable averages on the rise.