The 12.39am email that triggered Australia's response to COVID-19

Epidemiologist Professor Jodie McVernon was in the Qantas lounge at Canberra airport on the evening of February 3, when she took an urgent call from Brendan Murphy, then the Commonwealth’s chief medical officer. McVernon had for days been 'obsessively' tracking information on the mysterious new virus seeping out of Wuhan, China. Murphy had a fresh task for her. 'Your Prime Minister needs a projection, a future scenario, in 48 hours,' he told her. McVernon’s colleague, mathematical biologist Professor James McCaw, was also on the road when he received the same news. The two long-time collaborators had little more than two days to get a brief to the federal government’s National Security Committee – a first stab at how the alarming new threat might evolve. It was a curtain-raiser to what would prove to be the most destructive pandemic to sweep the world since the Spanish flu 100 years before.