Still in a pandemic but more time for reading...

This past year I read five nonfiction books about pandemics in general and COVID-19 in particular. All are excellent, and approach the issue from different directions. Two are pre-covid, and three are post-covid.

(As an aside, after 9/11, pundits exclaimed, “No one ever imagined an airplane could be used as a terrorist weapon!” Yes, they did. Tom Clancy’s novel, Debt of Honor (1998) ends with a terrorist piloting an airplane into a joint session of Congress, killing nearly everyone in government except for the designated survivor. Similarly, as covid circled the globe, pundits said, “No one expected a pandemic!” Yes, they did. Two of these books were published shortly before the pandemic, along with recent pandemic novels including Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers and Lawrence Wright’s The End of October. People just weren’t paying attention.)

In order of publication:

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, by Sonia Shah (2016).

Shah focuses on how pandemics arise: what factors, both biological and sociological, mean some outbreaks turn into a pandemic while others fade away? She uses the historical cholera (Vibrio cholerae) outbreaks of the 19th century to illustrate concepts that allow a pandemic to start and flourish: a jump from animals to humans, transportation around the globe, filth and crowding, governmental corruption and greed, and scapegoating. These factors show up over and over in pandemics. The vast majority of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, spread from animals to humans; air travel means that a virus can spread worldwide in a day; governments might try to cover up an outbreak or seize the opportunity to get rich selling treatments (legitimate or not); and people will blame the epidemic on scapegoats (Jews with plague, gay men with AIDS, doctors with covid). 

Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, by Frank M. Snowden III (2019).

Snowden looks at how epidemics affect society, inspire public health innovations, and even change the course of history. For example, when smallpox was introduced to indigenous populations in the Americas, it wiped out entire populations. The indigenous population of Hispaniola fell from 1 million to 15 thousand after Columbus, easily enabling colonization. So many indigenous people died in the Americas that colonists needed to import labor from elsewhere—leading directly to the African slave trade and Middle Passage. Another example: in the War of 1812, a third of Napoleon’s army died of dysentery (Shigella) on the march to Moscow, and then most of the rest died of typhus (Rickettsia) on the march back to France.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID, by Lawrence Wright (June 2021).

Although covid has of course been a global pandemic, Wright focuses on just the experience in the United States during the first year of the pandemic. 2020 was the deadliest year ever in US history. The United States has just 4% of the global population but 20% of covid deaths. Why? There were three factors working against us: 1. China obscured knowledge of the disease in the beginning and denied entrance to US epidemiologists; 2. CDC tests were faulty (with a contaminated component); 3. The former president spouted crazy anti-science messaging. Wright interviews experts including Anthony Fauci; Robert Redfield (CDC); Deborah Birx, who was more courageous than she appeared in press conferences, and embarked on a cross-country road trip to educate state and municipal leaders; Barney Graham and Jason McLellan, the researchers who were already working on an mRNA vaccine against the spike protein of previous coronaviruses, MERS and SARS; historian of medicine Howard Markel and CDC’s Martin Cetron, who investigated the 1918 influenza outbreak to learn what worked and what didn’t; and politicians of both parties. Wright also looks at how the pandemic became irrevocably tied in with politics of 2020-21, including Black Lives Matter/systemic racism and Stop the Steal/conspiracies. A right-wing conspiracy to abduct Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan because of her statewide mask mandate was prompted by the former president, who tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN.” That essentially turned into a dress rehearsal for the January 6 insurrection. Wright concludes that two qualities determined success or failure for a country facing covid: 1. experience (southeast Asia had dealt with SARS, Saudi Arabia had dealt with MERS, and Africa had dealt with AIDS), and 2. leadership or lack thereof.

Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley (July 2021).

Fascinating look at the history, politics, infrastructure, and ramifications of quarantine over the last 600 years and into the future. Includes visits to plague-era lazarettos in Dubrovnik, Venice, and Malta; the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha, which hosted some of the earliest COVID patients but only has room for 20 patients; the under-construction National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Kansas, which will allow research on horrible livestock pathogens like foot-and-mouth disease; the International Cocoa Quarantine Center outside London (cacao plants are one of the few plants that are so valuable that they are worthy of a three-year quarantine); the Cereal Disease Laboratory (investigating wheat pathogens that could wipe out the entire US economy, located in Minnesota and only operating in winter to prevent accidental escapes from the lab); the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, where radioactive materials are to be quarantined for 10,000 years (and addressing the question of "How do you warn people in the year 8,022 not to drill in this site?"); and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, keeping our planet safe from lunar or martian pathogens and keeping the moon and Mars safe from earthly pathogens.

World War C: Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic and How to Prepare for the Next One, by Sanjay Gupta (October 2021).

Unlike many celebrity doctors, Dr. Gupta is actually a smart guy and trustworthy. Gupta looks at where we are with respect to covid over the last 18 months. He conducted hours of interviews with scientists, doctors, and politicians. He covers the timeline of the pandemic, the science of viruses, the technology of vaccines, and talks of preparation for the next pandemic. Yes, there will be another pandemic, and it will be sooner than next century.