Another of Nature's 10: Uruguay's Gonzalo Moratorio: Coronavirus hunter

[NNadir]

From Nature’s 10: ten people who helped shape science in 2020, (Nature, December 14, 2020.)

Excerpt:

Fame came quickly for Gonzalo Moratorio during the COVID-19 pandemic. People recognize him on the streets of Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo. They buy him a beer every now and then when he goes to a bar. They even approach him on the water, whenever he goes out surfing with friends. And they thank him.

They are grateful because Moratorio helped Uruguay dodge the worst consequences of the pandemic. Moratorio, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute and the University of the Republic, both in Montevideo, and his colleagues designed a coronavirus test and a national programme for administering it that has helped to keep COVID-19 cases at bay as outbreaks have swept through Latin America — including Uruguay’s closest neighbours, Argentina and Brazil. Uruguay continues to record one of the world’s lowest death tolls — only 87 people by 10 December.

“We’re some sort of outlier,” he says. “We’re buying time. And all the time we buy will be precious until drugs or vaccines arrive.”

Moratorio was excited to start the year as head of his own laboratory for the first time, having completed a postdoc in Paris in 2018. He was planning to study how viruses mutate and how to make them less harmful. But in the first days of March, he and other Pasteur researchers from across the Americas met online to discuss what to do about the rapidly growing coronavirus outbreak.

Some researchers weren’t terribly worried. Carlos Batthyány, a pharmacologist who leads the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo, told his colleagues that he thought Uruguay would be largely spared by the pandemic. “I wasn’t very convinced of the impact it would have,” he says.

His confidence made sense. Uruguay — a country with universal health care, a robust epidemiological surveillance system and a relatively small population, of 3.5 million — has mostly evaded yellow fever, Zika and other infectious diseases that have plagued its neighbours.

But Moratorio understood the risk. “Gonzalo dashed out of the meeting and got to work,” says Batthyány. “When he’s convinced that something needs to be done, he knocks down mountains. He’s a Don Quixote in that way.”...

Imagine that, a country where people buy a scientist a beer for doing science...

Uruguay sounds like a civilized country, particularly when compared to a prominent North American country where a vast nuclear arsenal is put in the hands of a puerile insane person.

I excerpted another part of this fine article earlier: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: A force in physics confronting racism in science.