Now, on the fourth anniversary of that fateful time, Lipkin and his team at the Mailman School of Public Health are among a number of groups worldwide working to prevent the next global pandemic.
They have developed a system for quickly analyzing viruses, bacteria and fungi ‒ known and unknown ‒ found in patients.
If hospitals in Wuhan, China, had had this system in late 2019 when the first patients started appearing with respiratory symptoms, they could have analyzed blood or the gunk patients were coughing up and within hours realized they were dealing with something new and dangerous.
More:Five takeaways from the WHO's report on the origins of the pandemic
"This method, these assays are so simple to use and so inexpensive that you could do continuous surveillance in clinics, looking at blood, looking at sewage, looking at respiratory disease, and would have picked it up and known there was something novel circulating immediately," Lipkin said.
"It would actually give us what I like to describe as a global immune system."