Just Finished Reading: The Plague Year – America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright (FP: 2021) [336pp] 

It was going to ‘go away’ like ‘a miracle’, but it didn’t. Indeed, per capita the US was in to top 3 worse hit countries in the world by Covid-19 – despite (arguably) being the most advanced and with some of the best medical minds on the planet. So, what went wrong? A lot actually. 

As seems to be the usual case, authoritarian China first covered up the outbreak, played down the consequences, denied that it could be transmitted between people, delayed the publication of the gene sequence and refused any help from the WHO or CDC. Only weeks after up to 5 million people had already left the province did the Chinese authorities finally act. When they did, they were highly effective but multiple cats were already out of the bag and travelling across the world on international flights. 

Despite clear warnings, the US was slow to react. When travel from China was finally restricted it was already too late. The virus was already in the US (and indeed the rest of the world) and spreading – largely undetected. Mistakes were made. The CDC ‘tests’ were giving questionable results and that took weeks to resolve. Even when they were working as advertised there were far too few of them to do much good in the general population. The results came back in days – or sometimes weeks – making the whole process essentially pointless. Better, quicker, tests were needed. Some of these were available in Europe but only US manufactured tests were authorised. The emergency stockpiles of PPE and other medical equipment – including ventilators – had been run-down due to chronic underfunding over years. When investigated the cupboard was almost bare and what was there was either out of date or snapped up immediately. Rather than acting as a centralised authority – as it was supposed to – the Federal government essentially told the States that they were on their own and would need to source their own equipment. When they did so it was sometimes simply snagged by Washington and disappeared. Future purchases happened in secret.  

But you know the story... We all lived through it or at least the ones who lived did. America was certainly not alone in showing the world a master class of how NOT to handle a pandemic but it certainly gave it a very good run for its money. The Covid plague hit the US much harder than it should have done and kept hitting it much longer than it should have done. A few notable countries, the ones that actually had their shit together (I’m definitely NOT counting the UK here) like South Korea and New Zealand acted swiftly and decisively – without the need for dictatorial powers – and contained it, thereby suffering few deaths and little economic disruption. The US death toll was staggering, unnecessary and far from evenly distributed. A very good indicator of your chances of survival were not just age – but race and poverty. Essential workers especially, and health care workers in particular, died significantly more often than many others. 

Told with passion, and quite a bit of anger, this is the tale of an unprepared country (that should have been far more prepared than it was) coping very badly with a disease its own scientists had been warning about for over a decade – at least. Not all of the fault lay at the door of the Trump administration in the Whitehouse – there was certainly enough blame to go around elsewhere – but Washington did precious little to help where it could and did much to hinder the responses of others more competent than themselves. Although there was probably little new here that we either didn’t know from news reports and later investigations this was still an interesting read which covered a lot of the bases. Definitely a recommended read if you want a big-picture as well as street level look at a year (or two) few of us will forget. One more pandemic book to come – for a while.