Book Review COVID-19: "The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened, and How to Stop the Next One "

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.