The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

The story, in Joe’s telling, began in July 2014, when the seventy-four-year-old woman, who spoke no English, walked into San Francisco’s Chinese Hospital. She had a fever and felt shaky. The doctors suspected a urinary tract infection, gave her antibiotics, and sent her home. Three weeks later, on August 1, the woman appeared in St. Mary’s Medical Center with fever and a cough and loss of vision. This time the doctors did an MRI. The picture of her brain suggested that she’d suffered many tiny strokes. They gave her anticoagulants, to reduce the risk of stroke, and sent her home. Two days later, her relatives wheeled her into one of UCSF’s hospitals, comatose. The doctors ran her through the MRI machine again: suddenly her scans showed massive cell death in her brain. There was very little brain left to save. Still, UCSF’s doctors did everything they could think of to save it. They gave her expensive drugs that killed fungal infections and more expensive drugs that killed parasites. In just one morning they gave her $150,000 worth of medications. None of it had the slightest effect. On August 15 they removed a piece of her brain and found nothing unusual. A week later, on August 22, they did another biopsy and this time found that the blood vessels in the woman’s brain were all dead. No one knew why. And yet it wasn’t until two days later, on August 24, forty-five days after the woman walked into a hospital and three weeks since she’d arrived at UCSF, that anyone thought t...

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