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Book Review COVID-19: "The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened, and How to Stop the Next One "
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Sun, 2020-07-26 02:08 — mike kraft
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31594-4/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email#%20
In 2019, the Global Health Security Alliance assessed worldwide adherence to the International Health Regulations (2005), which supposedly commit nations to measures that prevent or control the spread of infectious diseases and mitigate their effects. The study found that no nation was fully prepared, and many countries—rich or poor—fell woefully short. This finding is only one of the many indications that we could have been ready, nationally and globally, to deal with a crisis like COVID-19, but were not. It's far from clear that the pandemic, once started in Wuhan, China, could ever have been contained. But there are good reasons to think it need never have been so catastrophic for both lives and economies.
Most science writers will at some point have written an “it's not if, it's when” precautionary piece about global pandemics. Such articles typically appeared in the wake of one of the outbreaks of lethal infectious diseases in the past decades: avian influenza A H5N1, influenza A H1N1 pdm09 (“swine flu”), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Zika virus disease, and Ebola virus disease. Most writers raised the spectre of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. But few reporters have mined this seam as deeply as Debora MacKenzie, who has reported on infectious diseases for New Scientist for more than three decades.
It's this wealth of experience that surely made the rapid publication of her book COVID-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened, and How to Stop the Next One possible at all—and which also ensures that, despite the speed at which it was put together, it offers an informed and authoritative picture of the origin and character of the pandemic. It is a superb, accessible one-stop shop to bring readers up to date on the science behind this crisis.
MacKenzie sets the context by describing the outbreaks of SARS in China during 2002–03 and MERS in Saudi Arabia in 2012.
She examines how the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is thought to have emerged from bat populations—I was unaware that trade in bats in the Chinese so-called wet markets from where transmission to humans probably started was fuelled not by long-standing traditions but by relatively recent, bogus health claims about wild-animal meat that pander to wealthy urban consumers. MacKenzie explains how the virus infects and harms humans, and what this knowledge means for possible treatments and the prospects for a vaccine.
It is probably no spoiler to say that there are no silver linings here. The book won't reassure readers that the worst is over or that our knowledge of COVID-19 is now complete. In fact, MacKenzie's list of missed opportunities, atrophied disease-control agencies, government cover-ups, and general complacency about this long-expected global pandemic is only the tip of the iceberg...
It's not even clear that COVID-19 is “the big one”: MacKenzie makes it plain that a deadly influenza pandemic is almost inevitable before too long. And that's before we even consider the vast reservoir of pathogenic viruses in animal populations waiting to spill over to humans as we encroach on their fragile ecosystems. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed some of the worst in governance and human behaviour—from denialism and lethal libertarianism in the USA and Brazil to state-sponsored disinformation coming out of Russia and secrecy and censorship in China during the early stages of the outbreak....
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