cats were clean. Guan had also sampled six masked palm civets, which weren’t clean; all six carried signs of a coronavirus resembling SARS-CoV. In addition, the fecal sample from one raccoon dog (a kind of wild canid, which looks like an overfed fox with raccoon markings), tested positive for the virus. But the data overall pointed most damningly at the civet.
This discovery, the first concrete indication that SARS is a zoonotic disease, was announced at a Hong Kong University press conference on May 23, 2003. One day later, the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language newspaper, ran a front-page story (amid all its other SARS coverage) on the announcement, headlined: SCIENTISTS LINK CIVET CATS TO SARS OUTBREAK. Residents of the city were quite aware, by then, that the SARS contagion traveled on human respiratory emissions from person to person, not just in the juices and flesh of wild meat. Earlier editions of the Morning Post, as well as other Hong Kong newspapers, had carried articles accompanied by vivid photos of people in surgical masks—a masked couple kissing, a hospital official demonstrating a mask and visor, a comely model at an auto show wearing a mask decorated with car advertising—as well as hospital staff and soldiers doing infection control in full hazmat suits. Hong Kong’s governmental supplies department distributed 7.4 million masks to schools, medical personnel, and health officials on the front line of response, and demand was high too among the general public. Circle K, the convenience store chain, had sold almost a million masks; Sa Sa Cosmetics had moved 1.5 million. Prices per mask had quadrupled. Despite the widespread alarm over person-to-person transmission, though, there was still great interest in learning where this virus had its zoological source.
Using a press conference to break the news about civets, rather than publishing first in a scientific journal, was unorthodox but not unprecedented. Journal publication would have taken longer, because of editorial work, peer review, backlogs of articles, and lead times. Circumventing that process reflected haste, driven by civic concern and the urgency of the outbreak but also possibly by scientific competition. The CDC in Atlanta had shown its own haste just two months earlier in announcing, also by way of a press conference, that scientists there had identified a new coronavirus as the likely cause of SARS. The CDC announcement didn’t mention that Malik Peiris and his team had found the same virus and confirmed its connection with SARS three days before. That act of claiming priority by the CDC, unnoticeable to the world at large, probably put the Hong Kong University scientists on edge against their competitors in Atlanta and elsewhere, and contributed to the decision to trumpet Guan Yi’s discovery at the earliest reasonable chance.
One immediate consequence of Guan’s findings was that the Chinese government banned the sale of civets. In its uncertainty, the government also banned fifty-three other Wild Flavor animals from the markets. The ban inevitably caused economic losses, generating such foofaraw from animal farmers and traders that in late July, after an official review of the risks, it was rescinded. The rationale for reversal was that another group of researchers had screened masked palm civets and found no evidence whatsoever of a SARS-like virus. Under the revised policy, farm-raised civets could be legally traded again but the sale of wild-caught animals was prohibited.
Guan Yi showed some annoyance at the doubts about his findings. But he forged ahead through scientific channels, presenting a detailed explication and supporting data (tables, figures, genome sequences) in a paper published in Science the following October. Leo Poon and Malik Peiris, his HKU colleagues, were included in the long list of coauthors. Guan and company worded their conclusions judiciously, noting that infection of civets didn’t necessarily mean that civets were the reservoir host of the virus. The civets might have become infected “from another, as yet unknown, animal source, which is in fact the true reservoir in nature.” They might have functioned as amplifier hosts (like those Hendra-infected horses in Australia). The real point, according to Guan and his colleagues, was that the wet markets such as Dongmen and Chatou provided a venue for SARS-like coronaviruses “to amplify and to be transmitted to new hosts, including humans, and this is critically important from the point of view of public health.”
By the time that paper appeared, the SARS epidemic of 2003 had been stopped, with the final toll at 8,098 people infected, of whom 774 died. The last case was detected