The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

Hmm, okay, I thought this would be a slightly different book. What I got was much more about the Before Covid Times and the pandemic's start. (I was hunting for a book to explain and help me digest the pandemic, comprehensively, start to finish.)

Anyway, Michael Lewis, as always, writes with an eye for warm-hearted, human details. There's something also very red blooded American guy about his writing. Which is fine. He's like the non-fiction Tom Clancy. He's very readable.

Basically, this book follows a handful of Highly Competent People, all working at various levels of government, and all basically stifled by the creaky machinations of our fraying, decaying, crappy government institutions. Each of these competent people struggle to (a) make every leader/authority understand the seriousness of the oncoming pandemic, and (b) do what they can - in their haphazard, not-centrally-planned, not-technically-in-charge way - to limit the damage. Meanwhile, American leadership is asleep at the wheel.

I had mixed feelings, honestly, because it initially felt as if red-blooded non-fic Clancy was making an argument FOR competent individualism OVER functioning collective action and institutions. Color me biased. Now that I finished the book, I actually think Lewis's argument is the opposite: even the MOST competent, well-meaning individuals will get drowned out by broken systems. And these individuals certainly did. Lewis opens his book by noting that while pre-Covid “war game” simulations (by the WHO? I forget) of a worldwide pandemic always modeled that America would fare the “best”, we actually did a pretty shitty job at managing Covid - with more excess deaths and suffering. It was like the country embodied, yet again, that infamous chart showing how much of an outlier America is re: healthcare spending vs. outcomes: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/mt/business/assets_c/2011/04/us%20health%20care%20costs-thumb-600x326-47611.png

This is (again) individualized in one of the competent individuals - who is seen by many as a “guru” and with the most humble yet clear-eyed approach on how to manage a pandemic - loses his own mother to Covid. It's a bitterly ironic tragedy, and, I guess, Lewis uses this as his point: again, even the most competent, informed individual will suffer if our systems are broken.