Roughly 200 people are under medical observation, several hospitals are under quarantine, and dozens are in isolation in Russia following the unexplained death of an infectious disease researcher at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia, in the town of Shelekhov, according to early reports of the situation on Sunday and Monday.
Researcher Darya Shipilova reportedly died last week from pneumonia of “unknown” cause, according to Rospotrebnadzor, a Russian public health agency.
Labs studying dangerous diseases will allow them, or even cause them to mutate in ways that they may potentially mutate in nature. This is called gain of function research. You let the virus mutate and then study the results of the mutation to learn how to fight it if and when it occurs in the wild.
That’s the most concerning part to me. Even if this lab wasn’t working on creating a weaponized strain of the virus, the escaped pathogen could still be a mutated and more dangerous strain than is typically found in nature. Just the possibility of this would justify the significant quarantine response in the area.