State of the Faculty Address 2020

2 “Le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés” (“Chance favours but the prepared mind”), so said Louis Pasteur, doyen of the germ theory of disease and eponymous founder of Institut Pasteur, an important Asian outpost of which resides at 6 Sassoon Road. This well-rehearsed aphorism has demonstrated its applicability in our case at HKUMed since the very beginning of the present pandemic, before it was declared a “public health emergency of international concern” or indeed even before it was officially named “coronavirus disease 2019” or COVID-19. COVID-19 Our Department of Microbiology and the HKU-Shenzhen Hospital provided the world’s first evidence to establish person-to-person spread in The Lancet ; the School of Public Health was the first to alert the world the likely national spread and global pandemic potential of the initial Wuhan case cluster in The Lancet , and working with China CDC presented the first set of epidemiological analyses showing how quickly the disease could spread and how to set quarantine and isolation rules in the New England Journal of Medicine . All these took place during the month of January, within a mere three to four weeks when the world initially learned of a handful of suspicious pneumonia cases in Wuhan on New Year’s Eve. Altogether, HKUMed has published 2 reports in Science , 4 reports in Nature and 9 reports in Nature series journals, 2 reports in the New England Journal of Medicine , 4 reports in The Lancet and 13 reports in Lancet family journals alone, in addition to literally hundreds more in top-tier specialty journals to inform pandemic control worldwide so far. We were prepared for this extraordinary public health event not seen since the great influenza pandemic of 1918. And we have delivered, in spades.