Tomorrow it will 100 days since an outbreak of a new virus was *first reported* to the WHO by Chinese authorities.

It'll be still just 58 days since the disease was actually given the name 'COVID-19'.

The speed at which scientists and medics are responding blows my tiny mind.

Remember there was a trend where politicians said what they were gonna do in their first 100 days in office?

People were like 'Smh. Good luck, changing *that* tax rate slightly in 100 days. Impossible.'

In meantime, scientists and others have sequenced the genome for the virus, developed and validated a test, distributed the knowledge about the test process globally, tested masses of people to the point we're all running out of stuff to complete it...

...initiated processes locally to create the stuff we're running out of to do the test, published papers on everything whether ferrets can get it, to how living conditions in different cultures impact transmission...

Launched dozens on dozens of efforts to repurpose drugs, and begun developing different types of vaccines using hugely innovative vaccine technologies involving stuff like hiding the bad COVID stuff in the stuff that our bodies recognise from fighting the common cold...

They've begun human trials for vaccines... Human trials in less than 100 days. Vaccines often take decade to develop, the scientists stuck their heads together and as an almost-global hivemind are getting this done after 99 days.

It's incredible. An immunologist yesterday said to me we're lucky this happened now - that it's a good time for this to time, if there could ever be a good time - if it happened a decade ago this wouldn't have been possible.

They're in Whatsapp groups, talking in real-time about papers published in New England and Beijing moments before. There's hundreds of them on Zoom conference calls learning what worked yesterday in Italy or China with patients in dire straits...

In Cork, they got a test process validated in a weekend, in Limerick they're making the chemical stuff to allow testing to go on... almost like plumbers making pipes because they've run out. They're just small microcosms of the global response, unthinkable 100 days ago.