The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

Over the next three days, the case count on board the ship rose from 61 to 135. The numbers shocked even Carter. “This is unbelievable,” he wrote. “We are so far behind the curve.” He laid out side by side the first ten days of the 2009 swine flu outbreak against what had already happened on the cruise ship. Swine flu had been so frightening because it spread so fast; this new virus was spreading much faster. Over the next ten days, the numbers grew exponentially. On February 16, when Lawler and Callahan evacuated 329 Americans from the ship, the count reached 355. By February 19, when the first two passengers died, 621 people were infected. Two days after that, Carter found, on the website of Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases, a field report filled with data from the cruise ship. “I can’t understand why no one is paying attention to this,” he said. “It’s a gold mine.”