The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

There Carter and his family remained for three days. The researchers stepped around them, taking notes. “They wanted to watch how people would behave,” said Carter. “So I got to watch, too.” What he realized, as he watched, was that there was no way a nuclear war would be anything like that. “My mom would be at home, and we’d be at school, and my dad would be at work,” he said. “We’d all be separated. We wouldn’t know how to get to the shelter, and that’s not where we’d go anyway.” His mind unspooled a different scenario that left him with a conviction that nuclear fallout shelters were probably a dumb idea. “Going through that experience forever changed my vision of these events.” He had a similar feeling at the end of the faux pandemic of 2009. Things went down differently than he’d ever imagined. If he had to do it all over again, he’d still have told Obama to close the schools. The lesson many had 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 have learned a hard lesson. Had they hit and killed a pedestrian, they probably wouldn’t want to get into the driver’s seat again...

The Downside of Experience: Mistakes Repeated with Greater Confidence