The elbow to elbow, the chairs at two meters, the hydroalcoholic gel in the nostrils, the masks in place: "The condom of the XXI century", says in his laboratory Eduardo López-Collazo (1969), scientific director of the Research Institute La Paz Hospital Sanitary.
At strict two meters, José Alcamí (1957), director of the AIDS Immunopathology Unit of the National Center for Microbiology of the Carlos III Health Institute.
They are the co-authors of
Coronavirus, the last pandemic ?,
number one in sales on Amazon in the category of Nosology and Infectious Diseases.
When they started the book, everything was distant and exotic.
"We were going to tell a phenomenon from the East and we already had a chapter finished when the virus reached Europe, and our approach was no longer theoretical and academic," says Alcamí.
Confined, each one wrote at home.
On March 20, Alcamí woke up and “couldn't even move his eyelashes”.
It had been infected.
A month without touching the book.
Both see today a blessing in that delay.
"The book matured," says Alcamí.
Isn't it very risky to write about a phenomenon that is just beginning?
"This is not an opportunistic book, it is very refined," continues the doctor.
And, yes, there are unanswered questions.
For me the most important: why the virus is transmitted so well between humans and why, in a couple of the same age and with similar pathologies, one is asymptomatic and the other dies ”.
And that of the last pandemic, between questions, is it serious?
"Obviously, it is a rhetorical question," replies López-Collazo.