The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

“Trump was a comorbidity.”

At last count the United States, with a bit more than 4 percent of the world’s population, had a bit more than 20 percent of its COVID-19 deaths.

story is about the curious talents of a society, and how those talents are wasted if not led. It’s also about how gaps open between a society’s reputation and its performance.

The tallest oak in the forest was once just a little nut that held its ground.

“Men like that always underestimate me,” she said. “They think my spirit animal is a bunny. And it’s a fucking dragon.”

“When a doctor stops treating patients, they slowly start to forget. Seeing patients is how you develop a sixth sense.”

Then came the real attack, of September 11, 2001—and, following it, the Bush administration’s weird shifting of public attention and fear from the Saudis, who had actually led the attacks, onto Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

He was always less interested in answering the question he’d been asked than in finding a more interesting question to answer.

“You can keep mistakes from happening if you can identify the almost mistakes.

The gist of it was that people don’t learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek, out of desire or need. For people to learn, they need to want to learn.

“People in an organization learn,” said Carter. “They’re learning all kinds of things. But they aren’t learning what you are teaching them. You go to a formal meeting. The important conversation is not in the meeting. It’s in the halls during the breaks. And usually what’s important is taboo. And you can’t say it in the formal meeting.” He

The words mattered less for what they said than for what they could be made to say.

which revealed to him how poor official channels could be for the transfer of information, and how rich the unofficial ones could be.

when you closed schools and put social distance between kids, the flu-like disease fell off a cliff.

(The model defined “social distance” not as zero contact but as a 60 percent reduction in kids’ social interaction.)

“I couldn’t design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system,” he said after his visit.

taken away from the event was how smart it was not to have closed the schools, or taken the kind of aggressive action that was necessary at the start of a deadly outbreak, to prevent its explosion.

“It’s like someone who looked down at their phone while driving and drifted onto the shoulder but didn’t hit anything,” he said. “The lessons aren’t as strong and defined.

Had that person hit a mailbox or ended up in a ditch and wrecked his car, he would ha...

“Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence,”

An Italian doctor named Carlo Urbani, detailed by WHO to investigate the outbreak, died before he could figure out what killed him.

To Joe’s surprise, the CDC shipped the lung in an ordinary FedEx box.

You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late.

You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.

I know that this is not CDC’s intent but it is creating problems for bureaucrats who suffer from malignant obedience.”

She knew that the human mind played tricks on itself. She’d heard about the anchoring effect and confirmation bias and the rest.

Charity had heard that the Trump administration might be using new arrivals from Mexico as weapons in a public relations war. When space in the migrant shelters ran out, ICE workers would drive these people into cities in the dead of night and just leave them there. “I’d heard that Trump was trying to create a crisis,” said Charity. “Trying to turn people against immigrants. It was just a rumor. But when I get there I find this is all true. They’re just dumping families on street corners at two in the morning. They were trying to create a disaster.”

San Diego County wanted nothing to do with it. She called the Red Cross, only to find that the Red Cross has no interest in helping, either. (She learned later that they didn’t want to offend their Republican donors.) The problem now belonged to the state of California, and she was now the state of California. At length she reached

By then she knew that the Trump administration had been flying migrants in transport planes from Texas to California, so that they might create more stress on the system she had built and, at the same time, take advantage of it.

mansplaining to her how to manage an outbreak and then tried to deny the existence of the flights. “At which point I was like, Fuck you. I was there. I saw it.” A few days later the flights stopped.

Duane Caneva

There was no system of public health in the United States, just a patchwork of state and local health officers, beholden to a greater or lesser degree to local elected officials.

“We don’t know how to do no-cost,” said Zuckerberg. “What do you mean?” asked Chan Zuckerberg. “It shows up as an error in the hospital computer if we put zero cost,” said Zuckerberg. “It won’t accept zero.”

But the biggest reason that the Biohub’s free testing service went underused was the scarcity of test kits. Actually, that’s not quite right. If at any point in the first few months of the pandemic you rolled into a hospital parking lot with a dry cough and a fever and asked to be tested and the nurses said, “Sorry, we have no testing kits,” what they likely meant was: “We have no nasal swabs.” The long translucent sticks that could be inserted deep into the nasal passage, and which offered the only reliable method to sample the virus at the start of the pandemic, were nowhere to be found.

What he didn’t say, because he was too embarrassed to say it, was that inside the truck they’d discovered not medical swabs but Q-tips.

So far as he could tell, there had never been any swabs in the Strategic National Stockpile.

The pandemic intervened, and Josh instead found himself trying to save Americans from their public-health system.

We had to become shadow public-health officers.”

April 2020. A bit more than 6 percent of the Latino residents turned out to be infected by COVID, most with high loads of the virus, though many had no symptoms. There were patterns in the test results—for

example, the richer the person, the less likely he was to be infected. Latinos were only 44 percent of the study but 95 percent of the positives. Of the 981 white people tested, zero were positive.

The big takeaways seemed to be what everyone was just then figuring out: the virus was disproportionately attacking poor people of color unable to work from home; and lots of infectious people were...

Science was now able to transform a novel coronavirus into little works of narrative nonfiction.

“The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.”