The Premonition: How not to handle a pandemic

Renu Sud Sinha

Michael Lewis is the master of non-fiction thriller genre. Right from his first book, ‘Liar’s Poker’, (1989) to his latest, ‘The Premonition: A Pandemic Story’, most of his books have made it to the top of charts. ‘The Premonition’has been on The New York Times’ non-fiction bestseller list for four weeks now. His last one, ‘The Fifth Risk’, trended for 14 weeks on the NYT list. Three of his books, out of nearly 15, have been turned into films — ‘The Blind Side’ (2009), ‘Moneyball’ (2011), ‘The Big Short’ (2015) — all boxoffice hits as well as nominated for the Oscars in various categories.

Lewis has made an impressive career out of writing compelling narratives on mundane technical subjects ranging from the Wall Street functioning to money bonds to 2008 financial crisis affecting global economy to baseball stats. As an NYT reviewer says, “I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it.”

In ‘The Premonition’, he has weaved together a story of a maverick bunch of oddballs. The group, named Wolverines, includes a scientist, a doctor, couple of bureaucrats and a public health officer among others. All of them have come together from within the system, knowing from past experiences during the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 2009 swine flu how under-prepared America’s public health system is to tackle the impending havoc the coronavirus will inevitably cause in the face of an unwilling bureaucracy and an ignorant and indifferent government.

True to his form, Lewis relies heavily on back stories of his central characters so as to make complex scientific and institutional workings relatable to the lay reader. And some of his characters are so compelling and intriguing that the result is an unputdownable book despite its technical nature. Among this ‘rogue group of patriots working behind the scenes to save the country’ is the feisty Charity Dean, a deputy director of California’s Department of Public Health and an expert in communicable diseases, who boldly takes on dysfunctional federal authorities.

There is Dr Carter Mecher, who isn’t comfortable being in the limelight but is central to this group of superheroes fighting an impossible war against an invisible enemy and a fragmented system.

Another unforgettable character is Joe DeRisi, a young biochemist, who has developed a chip that contains genetic sequences from every known virus and could help identify any pathogen in record time (and did, too, in 2003 as well as 2020).

In this superheroes’ story, the super villain, surprisingly is not an inept Trump administration, but the federal institutions responsible for public health and safety, which initially remained in a stupor, weighed down by rot and politics. Leading the pack is the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the apex body responsible for controlling and preventing the spread of any disease. However, much to their horror, most Wolverines in their past encounters have found the CDC always dithering in any crisis, being over-cautious to the point of endangering lives.

Despite having a preventive plan in place on how to check or control a pandemic, the CDC refuses to implement it. Back in 2005, George Bush, after reading John Barry’s ‘The Great Influenza’, an account of the 1918 Spanish Flu, had formed a task force and given it a grant of $7.1 billion to come up with a pandemic strategy. Mecher and another Wolverine Richard Hatchett had been part of that task force and had written an effective pandemic plan, whose many components the world has adopted today to tackle Covid-19, including shutting schools and colleges, isolating the patients and following social distancing, to slow the virus’ spread till a vaccine is found and administered.

The well-researched book has many such interesting stories. There are some horror tales as well. As cases rose unmonitored in February and March, an underfunded, overworked health-care system couldn’t even avail of an offer of free, single-day Covid test by DeRisi’s lab. The public hospitals couldn’t because their systems wouldn’t code for a $0 test, and for-profit private ones would rather pay $160 to private labs that would return results in 10 days. And finally when things fall in place, there aren’t enough nasal swabs in the market. When DeRisi asks the Strategic National Stockpile, the shipment turns out to be a bunch of Q-Tips. Another shipment turns out to be 5,000 eyelash brushes instead of precious swabs.

A masterplan for rest of the world on how not to handle a pandemic, the book is also an eye-opener, particularly for those harbouring the American Dream — the land of their dreams has been a nightmare for its citizens.