The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

There was good reason for Dr. Ai’s concern. Severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, a coronavirus that erupted in China in November 2002, had thrown the country into its worst political crisis since the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising. The initial response of the Chinese government and the ruling Communist Party had been to hide the outbreak, even from its own public health officers. Under the cloak of the news blackout, SARS spread through the country, reaching Beijing the following March. Doctors in charge of the treatment had no idea what was going on, so closely held was the information, but frightened rumors spread by text messages. Pharmacies sold out of antibiotics and flu medicines. The new disease killed nearly 10 percent of the people it infected, becoming the first epidemic since HIV/AIDS dangerous enough to threaten the entire world. SARS is thought to have passed from horseshoe bats into masked palm civets and presumably into its first human hosts in the wet markets of Guangdong.