The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

kids stand at the bus stop. When adults stand at a bus stop, they give each other space. Kids are like those close talkers on Seinfeld. He and Debra entered the school. Look! It’s just a sea of humanity. I could

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

big part of the answer, he decided, was in the nature of pandemics. They were exponential processes. If you took a penny and doubled it every day for thirty days, you’d have more than five million dollars: people couldn’t imagine

is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence,” he said. The line wasn’t his, but

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

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.

“who exactly is in charge of this pandemic?” “Nobody,” he replied. “But if you want to know who is sort of in charge, it’s sort of us.”

Charity Dean had been living for years with a mental model that fit exactly with the facts on the ground. Her model started with two assumptions. One, something was coming. Two, the CDC wouldn’t

The CDC had allowed people to believe that they were battlefield commanders—that, in a pandemic, they’d actually run the show. How that rumor got started Charity neither knew nor

Pence’s office saying that henceforth no one in the Department of Health and Human Services was allowed to say anything that might alarm the public. People were soon saying how brave Messonnier had been to say that the virus could not be stopped. To Charity,

wasn’t pleading with me to do the right thing. He was yelling at me. He was basically implying that the White House is not going to do the right thing. The White House is not going to protect the country. So California needs to take the lead.” That was the moment she learned that the White House

was listening in on the calls—and also the moment when she realized just how lost and desperate the people at the top were. “He’s the deputy director of homeland security. He can just go talk to the president. And he’s relying on some random blond girl to save the country. Really?”

but he was now a voice in her head—had figured out that each person who got the virus was infecting two to three others. Out of caution, you had to assume a reproductive rate of 3. Every week, the number of infections triples. Do the math and play it out across a California population with zero immunity, and seven weeks from today you’d have 11,809,800 cases. As much as 10 percent or so of those people, more than a million Californians, would need a hospital bed. Half of 1 percent, or a bit more than fifty-nine thousand people, would

the model’s output to Governor Newsom’s senior advisers. “When we showed them what the model was saying, it sucked the air out of the room,” said Park. The next day, Governor Newsom issued the country’s first statewide stay-at-home order. At his press conference, he said that the decision was “based upon some new information.”

The computer model gave the governor little choice but to shut down the entire state, and take responsibility for what should have been a national decision, because neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the president of the United

room the size of a basketball court, a COVID testing lab took shape. Setting it up gave Joe his first real view of the medical-industrial complex. It wasn’t designed for a crisis; if it was designed for anything, it was to maximize the profits of companies that enjoyed monopoly power. Labcorp and Quest, which were charging the state one hundred sixty dollars for every COVID test and returning the results so slowly that they were useless, were just one example. The companies that made the testing machines were another. The fancy so-called sample-to-answer machines had one big advantage: they were idiot-proof. Any

buy that quantity you always get a discount. But they said nope, you’re paying full price.” He was so pissed off that he looked around and found a smaller company, New England Biolabs, that sold the same enzyme. “Completely different spirit,” said Joe. “They said, ‘This is amazing! Forty percent discount right now!’ That’s how companies should behave.” It went that way with much of what they needed to buy: some companies sought to exploit the moment; others sought to help. “We quickly figured out that some companies actually have a moral compass and some of them don’t,” said Joe.

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.” She wondered if perhaps they had undergone a process similar to her own—a descent, which ended with them devoting lots of energy to appearing to know what to do when they did not. “In the beginning it’s filling in gaps,” said Charity. “You let the falsehood continue until slowly the falsehood takes over. By the time you’re done, you are no longer just filling blank spots. You have this burden of maintaining optics.