For most people, the Covid-19 pandemic, which officially began five years ago this month, marked their first encounter with case counts and N-95 masks and lockdown orders.

Not me, though.

I was a young reporter for Time magazine in Hong Kong in early spring 2003, when we started getting reports about a strange new sickness spreading in southern China, just across the border. On March 15, exactly 22 years ago today, that sickness was given a name by the World Health Organization: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

The SARS outbreak didn’t get much attention in the US because the country only had a small number of cases, and the worst of it overlapped with the invasion of Iraq. But back in Hong Kong, which became an epicenter of the outbreak, we had no idea when or if it would end.

Looking back on those days now, it feels like a dry run for what the entire world would experience less than two decades later with another coronavirus. Overnight, all of Hong Kong wore surgical masks. Airports, hotels, and restaurants were abandoned.

At the Time offices in the city, editors sweating through uncomfortable N-95 masks debated sending some staff to work from home, to keep the magazine going if our building were to be closed. I interviewed scientists about the possibility of a vaccine or treatment, and was told that if one were needed, it would certainly take years for it to be developed.

We ended up getting lucky with SARS. The coronavirus that caused it turned out to be far less infectious than it first appeared, and the outbreak ended up petering out — though not before more than 8,000 people were sickened and 774 died around the world.

With Covid, of course, we were not that lucky. More than 7 million people have been confirmed to have died from Covid so far, a number that is both........

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