Helen Y. Chu

Helen Y. Chu is an American immunologist who is a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the University of Washington. Her research considers maternal immunization, with a focus on influenza and respiratory syncytial virus. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chu was the first physician to recognize community transmission of the coronavirus disease within the United States.

Education and early career Chu was born in Western China. Her grandparents were academics in Luoyang. Her parent and grandparents were sent to work in countryside labor camps, but as her father had been born in the United States, her parents immigrated to Southern California. She is part of Seattle Flu Study, a multi-institutional community-wide virus surveillance platform that began in 2018. Traditionally, people rely on hospital admissions to know when the flu season begins and ends, but Chu believes that it spreads around the community through asymptomatic carriers who do not get admitted to hospital. She makes use of a network of kiosks all around Seattle to collect these samples.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chu became concerned that human – human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 was occurring in Seattle. Whilst it would have been simple to repurpose the nasal swabs from the Seattle Flu Study to test for coronavirus disease, Chu was not given federal approval to do so. Not long after she started testing, Chu identified a positive coronavirus disease test in a local teenager with no relevant travel history. Eric Feigl-Ding, epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that Chu “is a true American hero, [who] actually broke this epidemic identified in Washington state when no one else wanted her to test for the virus,”. Despite this, Chu was told that she could not go on testing; because she did not have the correct clinical certification to run coronavirus disease tests. In early March Chu was awarded permission from the Food and Drug Administration to start COVID-19 testing.

Selected publications