America's Covid battle, revisited

What happened? Our response to catastrophe is often bewilderment. This past year, much of the world found itself in a daze as an unknown virus appeared, rushed through countries and continents, and killed more than three and a half million people. Sixteen years ago, in another moment of earth-shattering destruction — the Indian Ocean tsunami — my family was taken from me. While our personal confusion about these unimaginable events will always linger, we are grateful for the clarity that comes from trying to comprehend the larger story.

Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year is his testament to the year of Covid in America. The book disentangles the country’s failure to properly respond to the pandemic — how was it possible that more than half a million people perished in the country with the most powerful economy in the world?

Mr Wright — a staff writer at The New Yorker — has performed a virtuoso feat and given us a book of panoramic breadth. It’s quite different from his other definitive nonfiction book on an American cataclysm, The Looming Tower, which was tightly focused on the roots of Al Qaeda and the events that led to 9/11. In The Plague Year he ranges from science to politics to economics to culture with a commanding scrutiny, managing to surprise us about even those episodes we have only recently lived through and thought we knew well.

We enter the core of America’s pandemic response — the White House, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, Bellevue Hospital in New York City. This is a book filled with personalities and biographies and histories. It has conversations. Some are chilling. We read about George Fu Gao, head of China’s equivalent to the CDC, starting to cry as he tells his American counterpart, “I think we’re too late.” And this was in early January 2020, when the full impact of the virus was still two months away.

It is almost a truism to say that “natural” disasters are not caused by nature’s wanton acts alone. History, politics, society, economics and chance, all combine to put us in harm’s way. America was ranked the most prepared country in the world to confront an infectious disease. There was a playbook, simulations had been done. So, what happened?

There is no one villain here — individual or institutional. In the early months, it was mainly politics that allowed the virus to breach. There were intelligence failings to confirm a key piece of information about SARS-CoV-2 — that it spreads asymptomatically. Then early testing was shambolic. The esteemed public health institution, the CDC, was the sole producer of tests and could not scale up to the sheer numbers needed. Worse still, this test was faulty because of contamination.

THE PLAGUE YEAR: America in the Time of Covid

Author: Lawrence Wright

Publisher: Alfred A Knopf

Price: $28; Pages: 336

And then wearing masks became politicised. President Trump’s personal dismissal of masks is one aspect of the grave collapse of leadership that Mr Wright examines in this book. Often, he uses an expert guide to walk us through these events in real time. In the White House, we have Matt Pottinger, deputy national security adviser, fluent in Mandarin, eyebrows a brighter blond than his hair. When it comes to the virus, he is consistently ahead of the curve — in stark contrast to an administration reluctant to accept the full measure of the threat. In his unflustered company we witness the high drama of decision-making about travel bans. When Mr Pottinger arrives at a coronavirus task force meeting wearing an N95 mask he is told that, next time, “no masks will be worn.”

The book shows us what it really looks like when government fails during a disaster. I found the policy bedlam described jaw-dropping. With no national plan for this unprecedented national calamity, “the pandemic was broken into 50 separate epidemics and dumped into the reluctant embrace of surprised and unprepared governors.” Surreally, states bid against one another to buy ventilators on eBay and empty trucks arrive in places where protective gear is desperately awaited. The president dismisses criticism — the government is “not a shipping clerk.”

It fell to science to put up resistance to contagion. The book has lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceu­tical interventions and disease waves. And Mr Wright keeps us hooked with his details. Young doctors write their wills. Barney Graham, who designed the vaccine produced by Moderna, tells of his extreme terror about making a mistake. In a chapter titled “Thelma and Louise,” we see Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, going on road trips — crisscrossing the country eight times to promote masking to state governors. And turns out, the bogus idea that hydroxychloroquine can cure Covid originated as a mindless tweet from a mountain-dwelling white supremacist who also predicted that the coronavirus would destroy feminism. Who knew!

In an intriguing chapter on the origins of the virus — which includes mention of the increasingly discussed theory that the virus leaked from a laboratory — Mr Wright observes that coronavirus is “a harbinger” of things to come. The threat of another new hazard setting upon a nation so flagrantly splintered is terrifying.