The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

What does one do, in the Mann Gulch fire, at 5:45? How does one respond to the sight of a thirty-foot-high wall of flame racing in one’s direction? State and local health officers still had no ability to test, as they were waiting for a test being created by the CDC. The CDC itself was testing only sparingly. With so little testing capability, Carter argued, you had to be smart about how you tested. He hit upon an idea: hospitals in the five biggest American cities should test anyone who showed up with flu-like symptoms. “I thought, Let’s go on a fishing expedition,” he said. “I thought, Why don’t we focus on where we think it is.” He began to track hospital reports of such cases and map them against numbers from previous years—and soon saw odd blips in Seattle and New York City. Those blips, he suspected, were cases being misdiagnosed as flu. The blip in Seattle would prove misleading; but the blip in New York, it became clear later, would have uncovered cases, likely a lot of them, had anyone bothered to test the patients.