Former CP reporter saw COVID coming

Helen Branswell joined the Canadian Press in 1986, serving in several bureaus. (Photo by Philip Pullella / The New York Times)

Helen Branswell, a leading reporter on infectious diseases who wrote with foresight, urgency and clarity about the emerging danger of the COVID-19 pandemic, ahead of the vast majority of journalists and even many medical experts, died Tuesday in Ottawa. She was 69.

Her death, at a hospital, was from complications of a recurrence of breast cancer, her sister, Brenda Branswell, said.

Branswell “saw the pandemic coming well before anyone was paying attention,” Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator in 2022 and 2023, posted on social media after her death.

Reporting at the time for STAT, a medical and science news site, she posted on Twitter on New Year’s Eve 2019 about a report of “unexplained pneumonia” in China, saying, “Hopefully this is nothing out of the ordinary.” Two days later, she posted a South China Morning Post article about the outbreak and wrote, “I wonder if this is connected to the outbreak and two much more concerning cases. Not liking the looks of this.”

On Jan. 4, STAT published her first article on the “growing cluster” of unexplained pneumonia cases, in which she noted the possibility of a new coronavirus. By the end of March, Branswell had written about 50 articles on the subject.

That February, Branswell moderated a panel in Washington that included Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At that point, there had been only 13 confirmed cases of COVID in the United States, and Fauci said the risk of the coronavirus spreading seemed “relatively low.”

Branswell, clearly skeptical, replied: “Explain to me why the risk is low. Because to me, when I look at this virus spreading, it’s spreading very efficiently.” She continued: “Like there’s no force field around China. It’s not going to stop there.”

Branswell “saw the pandemic coming well before anyone was paying attention,” Jha said. She was “a leading reporter on infectious diseases who wrote with foresight, urgency and clarity about the emerging danger of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“She was the best in the business of covering public health and communicable and infectious diseases,” Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, a physician and former medical reporter for the Times who befriended Branswell when both were covering the SARS epidemic of 2002 and 2003, said in an interview.

“I was always struck by how penetrating her questions were,” Altman added. “She had the ability to cut through the fog and BS to get to the heart of whatever was being discussed. She asked questions that often surprised scientists, questions about issues that the scientists hadn’t thought about.”

Mary Helen Branswell was born on May 19, 1957, in Sherbrooke, Quebec, roughly 100 miles east of Montreal. Her father, John Branswell, taught high school English and history. Her mother, Margaret (Steele) Branswell, ran a household of six children and later did clerical work.

Helen received a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1978 from St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Wanting to be a writer, she fell into journalism as a freelance reporter and then as a staff writer at The Daily Gleaner, a newspaper in Fredericton.

In 1986, Branswell joined the Canadian Press as a news agency reporter, serving in the news agency’s bureaus in several Canadian cities and in London as its European correspondent. She covered politics, foreign affairs, health and sports. She was hired by STAT at its start in 2015. Her interest in covering infectious diseases was spurred by the SARS epidemic, which began when she was reporting in Toronto.

At first, she found it stressful to wade through the dense jargon of scientific studies, but “she quickly got up to speed,” her sister said, adding that a three-month fellowship at the CDC in 2004 was “career altering.”

She went on to cover Ebola, Zika and other outbreaks as well as polio and influenza and became known for her nuanced, evidence-based writing.

Branswell’s reporting was so vital during the coronavirus pandemic that William Hanage, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called her “godlike figure to people who are infectious-disease epidemiologists” in a March 2020 interview with the Times.

Her understanding of the science, history and politics of the outbreaks she covered made her “a journalist who knew more than most of the experts she interviewed.” She received a doctorate in journalism from Columbia University.

In addition to her sister, Branswell is survived by four brothers, Kevin, Larry, Rick and Jack Branswell.