Daniel R. Lucey
[1] Daniel R. Lucey was born at Castle Air Force Base, into a military family in Merced County, California and spent his childhood in various parts of the United States including Florida, Ohio, Virginia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania and North Dakota.
[4][5] As a medical student in 1979, he spent two months at the Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, South Africa,[4] recalling later that this was his "first exposure to infectious disease".
in 1982,[4][7] following which he began his early training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF),[4] where he worked with people who were suffering from a previously unknown disease, later known as HIV/AIDS.
[4][11] From 1988 to 1990 he was attending physician at United States Air Force, Wilford Hall Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas.
[14] He has published works on inhalation anthrax, particularly the staging of the disease which he divided into four: "asymptomatic, early-prodromal, intermediate-progressive and late-fulminant", with survival being more likely with earlier administration of antibiotics.
[13][17] A later study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, showed the importance of detecting anthrax early and administering antibiotics within hours of a bioterrorist attack, as well as stockpiling chest drains to perform lung fluid drainage.
[6][24] Science writer, Laura Stephenson Carter, wrote in the 2012 alumni album of Dartmouth College, that for over 30 years Lucey has been "chasing things you wouldn't want to catch".
[2][9][32] Lucey visited Bangladesh during its nipah virus outbreak of 2004, caused by the consumption of date palm sap contaminated by fruit bats.
[34][35] His report in 2018, published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, called the incident in Kerala "a bellwether of that potential risk of a Nipah pandemic".
[33] He warned of a potential epidemic of nipah virus,[2][36] and stated at the time that "immediate enhanced preparation measures should include training on personal protective equipment (PPE), infection prevention and control, diagnostic testing, and clinical management protocols".
[42] Reporting on his views of the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease, caused by SARS-CoV-2, which began in 2019, Lucey recalled that "the SARS outbreak in Toronto in 2003 started with one missed case".
When Chinese researchers published their report in January 2020 in The Lancet, on the first 41 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, Lucey hypothesised that if the data was accurate, with 12 of the 41 with no direct link to the market and the earliest reported onset of symptoms being December 1, 2019, and with a calculated incubation period of up to two weeks, the virus may have already been quietly circulating among humans from at least November 2019 and "the virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace".
[45][46][47] His analysis of the Chinese report was published in a paper titled "Coronavirus — Unknown Source, Unrecognized Spread, and Pandemic Potential" in Think Global in January 2020.
[51] For his work in preparing the city of Washington for the anthrax attacks, Lucey received the "Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) medal" in 2002.
