The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

Back at his desk, Carter collected the official statistics from China: cases, hospitalizations, deaths. He compared them to whatever he could find in Chinese blogs and newspapers. It was slow going, as much of the information he found was in Chinese. “I had no idea what the stuff was,” he said. “It was all gobbledygook to me. My computer kept lighting up: ‘This site is Unsafe!’ ” He’d cut and paste what he found into Google Translate just to see what it was. Some were death notices. He saw that the dates on deaths reported by the authorities every day at midnight were later than the dates in the local reports—that is, the thirty-seven people in Wuhan who had reportedly died by January 23 had died earlier than the official stats suggested. The timing was important. “I was trying to get a sense of how old the starlight was,” said Carter. The average time from infection to death was maybe two weeks, and so the deaths gave you a sense of how widespread the disease had been maybe two weeks earlier. If, on top of that, the Chinese were slow to report the deaths, the lag, and the multiple, was even greater. He noticed that, while the Chinese government had been reporting only a handful of cases two weeks earlier, they were now behaving as if there had been many more. “Reading tea leaves,” he wrote to his fellow Wolverines. “I see that China is building a 1,000 bed quarantine hospital in Wuhan—in 5 days. They also called in the military to assist . . . Reminds me of the military c...