Dry-coughing as he pedals — a hack, hack, hack after-effect of his own personal battle with COVID-19 — the doctor cycles through the dark of pre-dawn Paris, speeding to a crisis meeting at his hospital where, way back in February, the disease carried away the first of what has now become more than a quarter-million dead in Europe. In the nine months since then, critical care chief Philippe Montravers and the 150 doctors and nurses he leads at the towering Bichat Hospital in Paris have become experts about their enemy. Puffing and spluttering as he pedals, because his lungs are still congested, Montravers details the progress that he and his team have made in their care since they fought off the gruesome initial wave of cases last spring, therapeutic advances that are helping Bichat and other hospitals better resist the renewed tide of infections.