As we learn the basics of self-preservation in the face of an evolving pandemic, what about actually understanding what is going on? For that we need stories that put the new coronavirus into context. COVID-19 is far from the first and won’t be the last pandemic we see. Here are a few of my favorite big-picture pieces.
In “The Word from Wuhan,” Wang Xiuying talks about life in Wuhan, China as the coronavirus has spread. From the most recent issue of The London Review of Books.
In “The Deadliest Virus Ever Known,” a 1997 story in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell tells the fascinating story of the 1918 flu pandemic, and new efforts to learn from it. “With luck, we’ll be able to anticipate the next Spanish flu before it does much damage,” he writes.
Next, two stories by Princeton research scholar and public health expert Laura H. Kahn, writing in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist:
In March, she wrote about how two American cities handled smallpox outbreaks on different occasions. One city’s approach was a success, the other resulted in riots and 244 deaths.
In 2014, around the time of the MERS outbreak, she suggested how we might avoid future pandemics caused by novel viruses: monitor the animal populations where these pathogens circulate before they make the jump to humans.
3/10 Update: Laura Kahn recommends “We Knew Disease X Was Coming. It’s Here Now” by disease ecologist Peter Daszak, from 2/27 in The New York Times. As he writes, “Pandemics are on the rise, and we need to contain the process that drives them, not just the individual diseases.”
3/18 Update: In this piece for Foreign Affairs, Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, lays out how a history of mistrust between the United States and China laid the groundwork for coronavirus conspiracy theories. It’s fascinating for its history of biowarfare and mutual accusations, and the different plausible theories of the origins of the new coronavirus.
Most important takeaway? “The claim that the novel coronavirus is a biological weapon is not only harmful but also scientifically unsupported.”
Elisabeth Eaves
While travel writing was my first literary love, I’m also a journalist, essayist, science writer, editor, and fiction writer. I was born and raised in Vancouver, lived in Cairo, London, and Paris, spent 10 years in New York City, and now reside in Seattle.