The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

“A guy finds a map in his backpack. The map leads them to safety.” What was cool about the story, Carter thought, was that once the soldiers were safe and able to study the map more closely, they saw that it was a map not of the Alps but of the Pyrenees. “A map has value when you are lost,” he said. “It gives you a starting point.”

“You cannot run out of options. Because what do you do when you run out of options? You panic.

Charity very much considered courage a skill. She was grateful for the fears that life had forced her to face up to in the way that she thought David should have been grateful to the bears, for preparing him to fight Goliath. “That list of twenty things I’ve overcome is the reason I’m a good health officer,” she said. “Those are my bears and lions.”

“The United States doesn’t really have a public-health system,” she said. “It has five thousand dots, and each one of those dots serves at the will of an elected official.”

Now she did not believe that the American government, at this moment in its history, would ever do what needed doing.

From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She

“I’m going to create a data-based tool for disease prevention that companies can use to secure their supply chains,” serious business types nodded. “Five smart people have replied with confusion when I said the company was to save the world and protect our country,” said Charity, after her first attempts to explain her vague idea. “Then when I said, ‘We’re going to do private government operations, like Blackwater,’ their eyes lit up and they said, ‘Oh wow, you could take over the world.’ ”