The 91av Book Club moved from a far-future space opera in July’s read, Claire North’s Slow Gods, to a much nearer future on Earth in our read for August. Peter Heller’s takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out the majority of Earth’s population, and follows the story of Hig, a lonely pilot, his dog Jasper – and their somewhat problematic neighbour Bangley. If that pandemic-struck world sounds like Peter was riffing off the real events of 2020, he wasn’t: he wrote it well before covid, and (as he wrote in an essay for the book club) found it extremely eerie to find life imitating art, as the world shut down around us six years ago.

I have to start with an admission: I am a big Peter Heller fan. He was an adventure writer and journalist before turning to fiction, and I really enjoyed his thrillers The River and The Guide for their unique blend of gorgeous nature writing and heart-in-your-mouth survival. Somehow, I’d never got round to reading The Dog Stars, and when I discovered that it was about to be released as a film by Ridley Scott – and that it was a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction – I couldn’t wait to read it with our book club.

I wasn’t surprised to also love this novel. It combined all my favourite things: wilderness survival, a post-disaster world, lovely writing – and a Very Good Dog. I was fascinated to learn, in Peter’s essay, how he wrote the novel cold – no initial research, no planning: “It was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I’d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table.” In our interview, Peter also told me about how he decided on the nature of the apocalypse that would affect his world, and what it was like to see his characters appear on the big screen, courtesy of Scott – spoiler alert, there were tears.

There was more of a mixed response to The Dog Stars from book club members. Karen Warren “found the first half a bit tedious, and probably wouldn’t have carried on if it hadn’t been a book club choice”. But ultimately she was glad she did, and “couldn’t put it down towards the end”. “I loved the way that there was hope even in a seemingly impossible environment,” she wrote on , describing the novel as “a testament to the triumph of the human spirit”.

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The writing in this book is very distinctive – jumpy and disjointed, reflecting Hig’s state of mind. Readers entered into an interesting debate about the reason for this. “I read it as him losing some of his expressive power while living with Bangley: not much real conversation, not much novelty, a lot of silence and repetition,” wrote warsaw_sun. “There’s a suggestion of fever in his history, is that supposed to have affected his language, or is it just that ‘men of action’ try to cut the descriptions right down following Hemingway?” wondered Alan_P.

Overall, Alan was not a fan. “I’m sure a lot of people will enjoy the book – but for me the view of human nature is just too grim and not realistic,” he wrote. He compared The Dog Stars to Tim Winton’s Juice – another book club read that is also set post-apocalypse, this time a climate one. “What bothers me is how these stories naturalise the idea that the only way to survive is to become the very kind of armed, unchallengeable patriarch that helped create the violence in the first place,” he wrote. “As humans we do well when we cooperate and badly when we don’t. Perhaps I wouldn’t survive a holocaust, but I don’t think empathy is weakness, I don’t think that kindness is naivety, and I don’t want to read any more dystopias.”

For Kelly, The Dog Stars was “not so much an apocalypse story (the how and the why) but a people story”; for Barbara Howe, it was “as much an old-fashioned Western as it is science fiction, if not more so”. “As in, isolated men with guns defending their claim and their women against marauders.” Dee55, meanwhile, was left pondering the very nature of science fiction. “I’ve been meaning to ask other readers here – does anything set in the future automatically count as science fiction? Or does the epidemic make it science fiction because that’s not a known type?”

It’s a great question! For me, science fiction is a broad and generous church, ranging from the science-light writing of the likes of The Dog Stars or another book club read, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, to the hard sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars and the space opera of Slow Gods. Next month, however, defining sci-fi isn’t something the book club will need to worry about…

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A global early-warning system for disease outbreaks and even future pandemics is possible with minimal monitoring: testing the waste water from a fraction of international flight arrivals at just 20 airports around the world.

When passengers fly while infected with bacteria or viruses, they can leave traces of these pathogens in their waste, which airports collect from a plane after the flight lands. “If you’re going to the bathroom on an aircraft, and if you blow your nose and put that in the toilet – or if you do whatever you have to do – there’s some chance that some of the genetic material from the pathogen is going into the waste water,” says at Northeastern University in Massachusetts.

St-Onge and his colleagues used a called the Global Epidemic and Mobility model to analyse how airport waste-water surveillance networks could detect emerging variants of a virus like the one that causes covid-19. By testing the model using different numbers and locations of airports, they showed that 20 strategically placed “sentinel airports” worldwide could detect outbreaks nearly as quickly and efficiently as a network involving thousands of airports. The larger network was just 20 per cent faster but cost much more.

To detect emerging threats from anywhere in the world, the network should include major international airports in cities such as London, Paris, Dubai and Singapore. But the team also showed how networks involving a different set of airports could provide more targeted detection of disease outbreaks that were likely to originate in certain continents.

“This modelling study is the first to provide the actual number of sentinel airports required to support effective global surveillance while optimising resource use,” says at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Airport-based networks could also provide useful information about disease outbreaks early on during an epidemic, including estimates of how quickly the disease can spread from person to person and how many people are likely to be infected from exposure to a single case, says St-Onge.

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Such waste-water surveillance could provide early warning for known diseases and possibly track new emerging threats too – if the bacterium’s or virus’s genomic data is available. “I don’t think we’d be able to look in the waste water and say: ‘There is a new pathogen that’s out there,’” says at Brown University in Rhode Island. “But when a new pathogen is announced, you can very quickly look at that previous waste-water data and say: ‘Is this present in our sample?’”

There are still some nuances to work out, such as how often to take waste-water samples to track different pathogens. Other challenges include figuring out the most efficient ways to sample waste water from aircraft and evaluating the system’s real-world effectiveness, says Li.

A long-term monitoring programme would also require cooperation from airlines and airports, along with a consistent source of funding, she says.

Individual airports could hesitate to participate because of perceived risk to their operations if infectious disease statistics are made widely available – unless data-handling agreements could assuage such concerns, says at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He emphasised the importance of coordinated international funding to offset “local political considerations”.

But even coordination through an international body like the World Health Organization carries its own political complications, given that President Donald Trump has initiated the US’s withdrawal from the organisation, says Ibitoye. Still, research such as this “contributes towards making [the monitoring network] a reality sooner rather than later”, she says.

The H5N1 bird flu virus that has spread worldwide is already better at infecting people than earlier strains. What’s more, a single mutation could allow it to infect the cells lining our noses and throats, making it more likely to go airborne.

This change alone is not enough for the virus to be capable of causing a pandemic. However, if a virus with this mutation swapped genes with a human flu virus, it could acquire pandemic potential almost instantly.

“The more people get infected, the more likely it is that something like this could arise,” says at the Scripps Research Institute in California. Despite this, Wilson thinks the risk remains low.

A particularly virulent form of H5N1 bird flu evolved in the 1990s, probably in domestic birds in China, and spread worldwide. Around 2020, a new variant of this virus emerged and spread even more widely, reaching the Americas and Antarctica. It has infected domestic poultry in large numbers and is also spreading among dairy cows in the US, causing occasional human cases.

A team led by at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands has now infected human nose and throat cells with H5N1 variants from 2005 and 2022. They have shown for the first time that the 2022 variant is better at binding to these cells and also better at replicating inside them. “It’s bad news,” says van Riel.

“I don’t think the chances of the virus becoming pandemic are extremely high,” she says. But the fact that the virus is better at infecting humans will give it more opportunities to acquire additional mutations that increase its pandemic potential.

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Meanwhile, Wilson and his colleagues have been studying the crucial haemagglutinin protein of the flu virus. This protein binds to receptors on the outside of cells, determining which cells the virus can infect. Because it protrudes from the virus, it is also the main target of the immune system.

At present, the H5N1 haemagglutinin binds mainly to receptors that in humans are found deep in the lungs. This means it can cause severe disease but it is unlikely to get out of the body and infect others. To do that, the virus needs to infect cells lining the nose and throat, meaning viruses can be coughed or sneezed out to infect others.

Van Riel’s study suggests the virus can do this to some degree, but it’s not clear whether the virus is binding to the main receptors on these cells. It was thought that multiple mutations would be required for H5N1 to bind strongly to these receptors, but Wilson’s team has now shown that with the current H5N1 variant, a single mutation is all it would take.

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This change alone would not result in a virus capable of going pandemic, says team member , also at the Scripps Research Institute. “We view this property as required – but importantly not sufficient – for transmission, for a pandemic virus,” he says.

Other changes are also necessary for the virus to start to replicate and spread from person to person, says Paulson, and these are not well understood. “There’s a lot of biology that we don’t even know,” he says.

Once an H5N1 virus infecting a human acquired the receptor-switching mutation, however, it would then have a chance of evolving these other changes as well.

What’s more, in theory, it could acquire all the abilities it needs in one fell swoop by swapping genes with a human virus infecting the same individual. Several previous flu pandemics were caused by animal and human flu viruses swapping genes, says Paulson.

“This is highly concerning,” says at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in either study. “Each spillover to a human gives the virus a roll of the dice.”

How deadly would an H5N1 pandemic be?

If H5N1 bird flu does manage to start spreading from person to person, the big question is how deadly it would be. Of the people confirmed to be infected with the virus since 2003, half have died. However, the true infection fatality rate could be lower as many cases have probably gone undetected, and milder ones are more likely to be missed.

Among the 60 or so people infected in the US since the dairy outbreak began, almost all have had mild symptoms only. Why , but one explanation is that many were infected via the eyes. “That is known to have far milder outcomes,” says Katzourakis.

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It is also thought that when viruses switch from binding to receptors deep in the lungs to those higher in the respiratory tract, they become less dangerous. But the puzzling aspects of the cases in the US have left Paulson unsure that this will hold true with H5N1. “Now I just don’t know what to think, to be honest,” he says.

“I don’t think there is any reason to be complacent in this respect, and anticipate ‘mildness’ should this virus become readily human-to-human transmissible,” says Katzourakis.

Wilson’s team studied the haemagglutinin protein in isolation, so there was no chance of a lab leak of the mutant protein. “There was no virus used at all here,” he says.

The Black Death was one of the deadliest pandemics in history, but its origins have long been mysterious. Now, the bacteria that started it all may have been found in three graves in modern-day Kyrgyzstan in central Asia.

When a genetic family tree is drawn up of plague bacteria from historical graves as well as those infecting people and animals today, the Kyrgyzstan grave pathogens seem to be the most recent common ancestor of the other groups. “They are the strain that gave rise to the majority of strains that are circulating in the world today,” says at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s really like the big bang of plague.”

The Black Death’s first recorded emergence was in Crimea in 1346, when an army laying siege to the city of Caffa, now known as Feodosia, catapulted disease-ridden corpses over the walls. Those fleeing the resulting outbreak of plague by boat took the disease to Europe. But where the infection had been before Crimea was unknown – with suggested sources ranging from east to central Asia.

Krause’s colleague at the University of Stirling, UK, noticed that excavations of a pair of 14th-century graveyards near a lake called Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan had uncovered a high number of tombs inscribed with the dates of 1338 and 1339 – several years before the siege in Crimea. Some of them had “pestilence” recorded as the cause of death. “When you have one or two years with excess mortality, it means that something funny was going on,” says Slavin.

Krause and his team managed to recover DNA from the bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, from three of the graves’ human remains. Sequencing this DNA let them compare it with other historical and modern samples of plague bacterium DNA, to make a family tree.

Yersinia pestis bacteria currently infect several kinds of rodents in many countries. But plague bacteria affecting marmots in the same region in Kyrgyzstan are genetically most similar to the old samples from the graves.

That suggests this region could be the place where the plague jumped from animals to people, says Krause. “This is a second line of evidence. There are thousands of genomes that have been analysed from rodents all over the world. But the closest relatives to [the strain recovered from the graves] are found in that particular location.”

Latest coronavirus news as of 1pm 9 June

Moderna’s omicron-tailored booster candidate produces eight times as many virus-neutralising antibodies against the variant as its original booster vaccine

An updated version of Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine that targets the BA.1 sublineage of omicron leads to an eight-fold increase in antibody levels against the variant of concern, according to a small, preliminary .

Moderna’s new booster is the first covid-19 vaccine to combine the jab that targeted the original strain of the coronavirus – which emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019 – with a vaccine that specifically targets the omicron variant.

In the clinical trial, the updated vaccine was given to 437 people who had already received two full-dose Moderna vaccines and its booster.

One month after receiving the updated booster, the participants’ neutralising antibody levels against omicron had risen by about eight times.

“The data we show today are really important because we get a really strong antibody response against Omicron,” Moderna’s chief medical officer Paul Burton told on 8 June.

“For the first time, we could really be looking at the potential for just once-yearly boosting, because we can get people to such a high level that they will take longer to decay.”

Whether these raised antibody levels translate into a reduced risk of hospitalisation or death with covid-19 is unknown.

“These antibody measurements provide an indication that is likely to translate into clinical effects, but an element of uncertainty in extrapolating the results to clinical effectiveness must, inevitably, remain,” Stephen Evans at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said in a statement to the Science Media Centre.

Other coronavirus news

India has its highest number of daily covid-19 cases since March. The country’s health ministry reported today that 7240 new coronavirus infections had occurred in the last 24 hours.

while it conducts mass coronavirus testing. This comes just one week after the city eased restrictions that had confined about 25 million people to their homes since March.

As of 11 June, people living in the south-western district of Minhang will be placed under “closed management” until they have all been tested.

Essential information about coronavirus

Where did coronavirus come from? And other covid-19 questions answered

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Long covid: Do I have it, how long will it last and can we treat it?

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Covid-19: The story of a pandemic

What to read, watch and listen to about coronavirus

91av Weekly features updates and analysis on the latest developments in the covid-19 pandemic. Our podcast sees expert journalists from the magazine discuss the biggest science stories to hit the headlines each week – from technology and space, to health and the environment.

is a BBC Radio 4 series exploring how viruses can cross from animals into humans to cause pandemics. The first episode examines the origins of the covid-19 pandemic.

is a BBC documentary, which investigates what the high covid-19 death rates in ethnic minority patients reveal about health inequality in the UK.

is a BBC documentary about the inside story of the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine against covid-19.

is a Channel 4 documentary which tells the story of the coronavirus pandemic through the eyes of the scientists on the frontline.

is assessing the progress in development of potential drug treatments for covid-19, and ranking them for effectiveness and safety.

is a project highlighting the experiences of key workers on the frontline in the fight against coronavirus in the UK, through social media.

is a BBC Panorama investigation of the death of transport worker Belly Mujinga from covid-19, following reports she had been coughed and spat on by a customer at London’s Victoria Station.

on Netflix is a short documentary series examining the coronavirus pandemic, the efforts to fight it and ways to manage its mental health toll.

by Debora Mackenzie is about how the pandemic happened and why it will happen again if we don’t do things differently in future.

is about the new science of contagion and the surprising ways it shapes our lives and behaviour. The author, Adam Kucharski, is an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, and in the book he examines how diseases spread and why they stop.

1 June

An estimated 2 million people in the UK have lingering covid-19 symptoms more than four weeks after their initial coronavirus infection

Based on the latest of people living in private households in the UK, an estimated 3.1 per cent of the population were experiencing long covid symptoms as of 1 May.

This is 200,000 more people than , as of 3 April.

Of the estimated 2 million people with long covid, 1.4 million are thought to have been infected, or suspect they were infected, at least 12 weeks prior to their ongoing symptoms.

Meanwhile 826,000 are estimated to have been infected with covid-19, or had a suspected infection, at least one year earlier. About 376,000 would have first been infected at least two years ago.

Of those surveyed, 55 per cent with long covid had fatigue, the most commonly reported symptom. This was followed by 32 per cent of people experiencing shortness of breath, 23 per cent having a cough and 23 per cent experiencing muscle aches.

Other coronavirus news

Three doses of a coronavirus vaccine, regardless of what type, are the most effective defence against covid-19, .

Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) analysed 53 vaccine studies conducted throughout the pandemic. The studies included over 100 million participants who together received seven different types of covid-19 vaccines in 24 dosing combinations.

Results suggest three doses of any mRNA vaccine, such as those manufactured by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, is 96 per cent effective against asymptomatic and symptomatic covid-19 infections, accounting for the different variants.

An mRNA booster after two doses of an adenovirus vector vaccine, such as those manufactured by AstraZeneca/The University of Oxford and Johnson & Johnson, is 88 per cent effective.

Despite higher efficacy with a three-dose mRNA vaccine regimen, three doses of any covid-19 vaccine is still very effective, according to the researchers.

A third of people in the UK think the government is exaggerating the number of covid-19 deaths, .

Researchers at King’s College London surveyed 12,000 people about their views on covid-19 across six countries: the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Norway and Poland.

A third (33 per cent) of people in the UK believe the government is exaggerating the number of covid-19 deaths, a figure that is even higher in Poland, at 43 per cent. Norway has the lowest proportion of people who do not trust the government’s mortality figures, at 24 per cent.

The researchers also found that 15 per cent of people in the UK do not believe that nearly all scientists think the covid-19 vaccines are safe.

“Across both the UK and other European countries included in this study, there is a stubborn minority who still question not only the scientific consensus on vaccine safety but also government reporting of Covid deaths,” Bobby Duffy at King’s College London in the UK said in a statement.

See previous updates from May 2022, April 2022, March 2022, February 2022, January 2022, November to December 2021, September to October 2021, July to September 2021, June to July 2021,��May 2021, April to March 2021, February 2021, January 2021, November to December 2020, and March to November 2020.