The Premonition

 

Michael Lewis, “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story,” W.W.Norton Co., 2021v, 304 pp.

If this author wrote a book explaining how to use a stapler, I’d get it.  I read everything he writes and never regret doing it: same with this book and its chronicle of the pandemic through the eyes of capable people on the ground. 

My Notes:

Pg. xxiv:  During the first half of the Trump administration, Lewis wrote “The Fifth Risk.”  This book framed the federal government as a manager of a portfolio of existential risks: natural disasters, nuclear weapons, financial panics, hostile foreigners, energy security, food security, and on and on and on.  The government is essentially a collection of experts, among them some real heroes, whom we neglected and abused for more than a generation (calling them “The Deep State”).  That abusive behavior climaxed with the Trump administration.  The “Fifth Risk” had asked: What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?  Yet, for the better part of three years, the Trump administration got lucky.  That luck ran out in late 2019 as a freshly mutated virus in China made its way toward the US.

Pg. xv:  At last count the US, with a bit more than 4 percent of the world’s population, had a bit more than 20 percent of its COVID-19 deaths.  If the US death-rate by February 2021 had simply tracked the average of the other six G7 nations, 180,000 of those people would still be alive.  (It got worse).

(A book on the 1918 influenzea: “The Great Influenzea” by John Barry documents the 50 million deaths of that pandemic.) George W. Bush read this book.  It so alarmed him that he immediately set about preparing the US for another pandemic (p. 53).  His speech announced the new strategy.  It had three parts to it: to detect outbreaks overseas so they might remain there; to stockpile vaccines and antiviral drugs; and, finally, to “be ready to respond at the federal, state and local levels in the event that a pandemic reaches our shores.”  (When the 9-11 attack occurred, Bush, in spite of most of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, turned his attention to Iraq as he was afraid Hussein had preserved a store of the smallpox virus p. 57).   (The last known case of a smallpox infection was a Somalian in 1977).

 

Pg. 11:  TB has basically been around forever; at the turn of the century it was the leading killer of human beings, and it remains in many ways a mystery.  You can get TB in many places as well as the lungs: uterus, eye, finger, brain, etc..

Pg. 53:  (The 1918 flu had a reproductive rate of between 1.8 and 2.1; measles is between 12 and 18).  In Philadelphia, then the nation’s third-largest city, in just five weeks in the fall of 1918, twelve thousand people died.  Covid-19 is estimated to have a reproductive rate between 1.8 and 2.5)

Pg. 57:  The September 11, 2001, attack by mostly Saudis for some reason diverted Bush’s attention to Iraq.  George W. Bush was afraid that Saddam Hussein had preserved the smallpox virus.  (The last known case of smallpox was a Somalian, who was diagnosed on October 26, 1977).

Pg. 90:  There were seventy thousand busses in the entire US public transportation system, but five hundred thousand school buses.  (Little traveling petri dishes).

Pg. 138:  In 2003 there was shocking news: a coronavirus had killed a human.  No one had ever heard of a coronavirus causing severe illness in people.  Coronaviruses could be deadly to animals, but in people they’d always manifested themselves as the common cold.  WHO eventually named this a severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.  This first SARS outbreak ended quickly because those infected had been isolated quickly and prevented from infecting others. 
Those capable of infecting others were easy to identify because they were so obviously ill.  There were few, if any asymptomatic spreaders.  Only 8,000 people died.

Pg. 163:  On April 9, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton as his national security adviser.  The next day Bolton fired or demoted everyone on the biological threat team.  Bolton and Trump lived by the tacit rule last observed ty the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation-states.  The Bush and Obama administrations’ concern with other kinds of threats was banished to the basement. 

Pg. 166:  On January 18, 2020, China acknowledged that sixty-two people were infected in Wuhan.  It was obviously a lot more, likely between 1,000 and 5,000.  The next day, the first American tested positive for the new virus.  He had travelled a week before from Wuhan to Seattle.  Trump stated, “It’s one person coming in From China, and we have it under control.” 

Pg. 196:  The first death caused by COVID-19 recorded in the US occurred in Seattle on February 28, 2020.  Later Santa Clara County reclassified two earlier deaths after figuring out that they too, had been caused by COVID-19.  It was estimated that they had been infected about Jan 6^th and died a month later.

Pg. 179:  On January 31, 2020, the US finally acted, sort of.  It restricted travel by foreigners into the country and required any American returning from China to quarantine for fourteen days.  “We pretty much shut it down from coming in from China,’ said Trump.  By then the virus was probably so widespread in the US that the focus on foreign travelers was a pointless distraction. 

Pg. 228:  It is estimated that do fend off Covid-19, 75% of the population will have to be vaccinated or become infected to achieve herd immunity.

 

Addenda:  Pg. 289:  When William Herbert Foege finally became fed up with the interference of the Reagan administration, he resigned.  As CDC director he was, at the time, a career civil servant.  But the White House now began sending minders with him whenever he testified before Congress.  Any research having to do with Aids, FOR INSTANCE, HAD TO FIRST BE VETTED BY THE White House.  The breaking point for Foege came in 1983, after CDC’s researchers established a connection between aspirin and Reye’s syndrome in children.  When given to children suffering from flu or measles, aspirin could trigger swelling in the liver and the brain and, in rare cases, death.  Companies that manufactured aspirin petitioned the White House to tell Foege to cease and desist.  “Do a new study.”  After Foege resigned, the White House converted the position of CDC director from career civil servant to presidential appointee.  The president could now fire the director with a tweet.  (The CDC began in 1946).

*Note that Tony Fauci is a career civil servant.  He can only be fired for cause and only by the head of the National Institutes of Health, not the president.  Robert Redfield, the Head of the CDC is subject to being fired by tweet.