The Premonition – Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis – what might have been. The story’s focus is on public health officers and a group of outliers (called wolverines), not uniquely about COVID-19 itself. Michael Lewis promotes their medical ideas without serious question, and without a parallel story of COVID-19 and also without much attention outside California.
Michael Lewis starts with Charity Dean, a Californian public health officer, and then the “Gang of Seven” – a group of doctors and scientists who promoted a pandemic preparedness plan that wasn’t adopted by the Government. But Lewis’ does not question their ideas however controversial. This is mostly occurring in California. The ideas included a stay-at-home order for the entire country, use of heat maps to manage the control measures regionally, and non-enforcement through transparency. This third factor was strange in how it focused on “you know who farted in the room.” The focus was on local control rather than government imposing restrictions. It was blue sky thinking and a long way from reality with Trump at the helm. The other issue is that it excluded the CDC – another reason the plan failed.
An example of Lewis not discussing their ideas is their proposal for the closure of schools to mitigate the infection rate. There is no discussion of its damage children’s education and socialisation. There is also no discussion of the economic, social and educational impact.
A hefty part of the first half of the story is preoccupied with the back stories of the lead characters. Whilst undoubtedly it paints a compelling story about how this group of medical professionals, who called themselves wolverines, rose through their careers by challenging the norm, this in effect shapes the book about them as opposed to the pandemic itself. Lewis emphasises how the group wanted to anticipate the next step of a disease rather than looking at where it is now – but the state would not take the risk.
It is about half way through the book that the COVID-19 pandemic makes an entrance. By two thirds of the way through the story it is still yet to formally break through into USA. As a pandemic story this is not the one. It is in effect a narrow medical perspective of a much wider societal and economic challenge that COVID-19 presented.
The focus on the medical argument in the book is interesting in how it became the formal government position in the UK shutting out the economic and educational consequences.
Carter also emphasised the centrality of testing. This is where Lewis’s story comes in to its own. CDC played a pivotal role in rolling out testing – in that it did not let it happen: “the greatest trick the CDC played was convincing the world that containment wasn’t possible.” The sad reality is how the public sector had no funding or willpower to test and the private sector was not included. Lewis takes the story down the route of the CDC as a disgrace, used by the Trump administration in what was probably the wrong direction.
Lewis’ focus on public health officers is one of sympathy in their plight and another in what could have been. The farce of them relying on fax machines, that did not always function reinforces their impotence in dealing with medical emergencies. The tragedy of them is only fully revealed at the end when they attempt to intervene such as with mask orders only to be undermined by the CDC and vilified for their actions.
Lewis spends a lot of time on back stories such tuberculosis and how tracking was just as important as testing. He leaves it to the end of the book to tell the story of the CDC as a government institution turned political puppet. Once the career civil servant running the CDC had been removed by a government appointee it lost its impartiality. So the book is a disappointment on many levels, whilst exhaustively researched and compelling in its own myriad of stories. It is not until towards the end that the tragedy of the story of COVID-19 in America comes to light.
Lewis ends by returning to Charity and how she thought that the ability to respond to a COVID-like threat. The risk here is how America would survive another pandemic.
