OpinionDoctors aren’t enough – to fight the new coronavirus, we need an all-of-science response

Fighting a species-level threat like Covid-19 requires the best brains from disciplines as varied as mathematics, AI, sociology and psychology

Learning to work together under the threat of outbreak lays the foundation for global collaboration to fight larger threats like climate change

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A researcher delivers detection reagents for the new coronavirus at a company in Tianjin, China. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 7:30am, 17 Feb 2020Updated: 7:43am, 17 Feb 2020

In April 2019, humanity saw what was previously thought unseeable when Nasa released our first picture of a black hole. Black holes are so dense no light escapes from them, making them invisible and any pictures hitherto impossible. We produced that picture because a whole bunch of scientists worked together, representing the height of our species’ collaborative abilities.

Hundreds of astronomers, astrophysicists, computer scientists, engineers and mathematicians from tens of countries worked for two hard years in a symphony of human collaboration, showing how interdisciplinary work is the best work. If we can take a picture of the invisible with a coalition of the unlikely, then we can certainly do the same to beat Covid-19 today and all other outbreaks tomorrow.

Who then, are the new outbreak experts? Why do we need them? How could it work?

When I was a medical student and then a young doctor, it was impressed upon me that doctors have the power to cure diseases, and that we alone are the most important discipline in a health system. We were wrong – doctors only have a small part of the truth. Other parts of the truth belong to scientists, scholars and experts outside medicine and the health sciences.

Fighting a species-level threat like Covid-19 requires the best brains of our species, and many of the solutions lie outside vaccines, medicines and intensive care units. They lie within the old sciences of chemistry, biology and virology, and the new sciences of big data and artificial intelligence, computer science and statistical models of disease transmission, and genomic medicine.