Via The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a book review by Amesh Adalja: The words that shaped COVID-19. I have already downloaded a copy.
As someone who has been immersed in the COVID-19 pandemic since January of 2020, looking back on all that has happened since the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is an extreme challenge. Trying to keep the full context of all the events, the new discoveries, the policies, and the rhetoric is almost a specialty in its own right. That's why a book like Unprepared: America in the Time of Coronavirus by Jon Sternfeld has such value.
There will be many books written on this pandemic, but I suspect none that provide such a unique service as Unprepared does. This book is not a traditional narrative but more akin to a pandemic scrapbook. Unprepared is entirely comprised of COVID-related quotations from public figures, news outlets, and organisations. These are chronologically ordered beginning with the ominous news of Dec 31, 2019, which heralded what was to come, extending through June 5, 2020. The book is divided into five sections each aptly titled (e.g., “The Arrival”, “The Emergency”, “The Reckoning”).
In a pandemic response, the early days are the most important. This is when critical actions can be taken that will determine the trajectory of the days, months, and years to come. If a burgeoning emerging infectious disease outbreak can be met with an onslaught of public health resources and leadership to test, trace and isolate the contagious, a very different future emerges than if it is not.
Unprepared shows you the latter in often stomach-churning detail. Contemporary readers of this book will be provided with a haunting day-by-day recounting of the onslaught of the pandemic and will relive real-time the litany of mistakes made and several pages later see the inevitable results.
The US response to this outbreak is one that has been characterized by evasion at the highest level of government from the very start and the quotations concretise and memorialise what gave the USA the devastating path we are now in the midst of. Readers in the future will get a glimpse of what US citizens living in the pandemic era were hearing from experts, politicians, and others in a succinct package.
One of the great values to me that I didn’t anticipate was seeing how, reading the book in November of 2020, certain strands that were only hinted upon in early quotations come to fruition. For example, the fact that testing is a facet of pandemic response that has remained flawed throughout this experience can easily be juxtaposed to quotes disdaining testing months ago. The book also provides a method to easily see lies and misinformation, often emanating from President Trump, as such statements are often immediately followed by another statement from a subject matter expert directly contradicting the prior one. The book also allows one to track opposition to certain governors and see the alarming rise in inflammatory rhetoric that, later on, culminated in a horrific kidnapping and murder plot.
Interspersed throughout the book are official statistics that catalogue the ruinous state of the economy and the events surrounding the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis which give the reader a more complete understanding of the reach of the pandemic and the larger ongoing societal circumstances.
As someone who studies pandemics, works to prevent them, and enhance resiliency to them, I found the book an invaluable resource. It provides a whirlwind tour of the first 6 months of the pandemic in an easily digestible format that highlights many of the salient events that occurred. So much has happened—and will happen—in this pandemic and it cannot and must not be forgotten.
The world will undoubtedly face another pandemic threat in the future and the mistakes of this pandemic, which will lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the USA alone, must never be repeated. Those parts of the book that read like a horror file should be revisited from time-to-time and studied in schools.
Unprepared is a book, I think, that should be on all Americans’ shelves. This is not just a book for experts or pandemic aficionados. Since the book concretises how badly things can go during a pandemic— as well as how the cascading impacts of a pandemic spare no one—it will be a powerful reminder for generations to come of how a tiny virus upended the most powerful and wealthy country in the world, a nation that had been deemed the world's most prepared for an infectious disease emergency.
