The Plague Year

Chapter 1

It s Going to Be Just Fine

One minute before midnight on December 30, 2019, ProMED, a closely watched online publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, posted an article translated from Chinese media stating that twenty-seven cases of what was termed a pneumonia of unknown cause had been found in Wuhan. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization learned of it almost immediately.

Robert Redfield, the sixty-eight-year-old director of the CDC, was vacationing with his family in Deep Creek, Maryland, when he read the ProMED notice on New Year s Eve. Several alarming details jumped out. The pneumonia appeared to be associated with a seafood market in Wuhan. Patients suffering from the pneumonia were placed in isolation, which was prudent, but suggestive that the health authorities were concerned about human-to-human transmission. Whether or not it is SARS has not yet been clarified, the document said, and citizens need not panic.

On January 3, 2020, Redfield spoke with his counterpart in China, George Fu Gao. Like many similarly named organizations around the world, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was modeled on the American original. Redfield had heard that the first twenty-seven reported cases included three family clusters. It was unlikely that each of them had been simultaneously infected by a caged civet cat in a wet market. When pressed, Gao assured Redfield that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. It seemed to Redfield that Gao was only just learning of the outbreak himself. Redfield offered to send a team of CDC disease detectives from the U.S to investigate, but Gao said he was not authorized to invite them. He told Redfield to make a formal request to the Chinese government. Redfield immediately assembled a team of two dozen epidemiologists and disease specialists, but no invitation ever arrived.

The specter of SARS hung over

LAWRENCE WRIGHT is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, a screenwriter, and the author of ten books of nonfiction, including The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and God Save Texas. His recent novel, The End of October, was a New York Times best seller. Wright's books have received many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.

A virtuoso feat . . . [Wright has] given us a book of panoramic breadth, [ranging] 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. The story he tells is immediate and often piercingly intimate . . . The Plague Year has lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, [and] Wright s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive. Sonali Deraniyagala, The New York Times Book Review

Arresting . . . Lean-limbed, immersive . . . Rich with peerless reportage and incisive critique . . . Translates the complexities of epidemiology into plain English . . . Wright is at his commanding best . . . when he places the pandemic in historical context his detours into the Black Plague and the 1918 Spanish flu are narrative marvels and in his portraits of the players. Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune

[An] incredibly-crafted telling . . . [Wright] is an earnest prober, with sober-minded curiosity . . . [He] provides a well-wrought map covering the institutions and politicians that failed America during this stretch of the pandemic [and] crucially highlights those that also saved us the first responders and the reasonable. Eric Allen Been, The Boston Globe

A master at knitting together complex narratives . . . Wright s deep research reveals the oversights and errors that fatally hampered the US response to Covid . . . A story about hubris and division, complacency and insularity, but most of all precariousness. Andrew Anthony, The Guardian

Insightful . . . Indispensable as a coronavirus compendium. Very little escapes Wright s notice, and he is adept at placing the ongoing story in an enlightening context . . . The illuminating profiles include, among others, vaccine researchers Barney Graham and Jason McLellan; Bellevue Hospital doctor Barron