The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

 Living through 2020 and into 2021 with all the sickness and death surrounding us has been stressful and puzzling. Why has the most advanced country in the world not been able to deal with the catastrophic pandemic that has plagued us? In The Plague Year Wright postulates how we arrived at the state that we are in and how things could have been different. 

Beginning from the beginning in Wuhan, China, he chronicles the onset of the novel Coronavirus to the Insurrection of January 6, 2021. He focuses on all aspects of the pandemic from scientific to political to the economic impact of the disease and the way it was handled. His research was in depth and relied on accounts from behind the scene sources who knew intimately what was being said and done on the national and international fronts. The reader can clearly see how the devastating results of how information and actions were not handled in a timely and expedient way. The impact of this and the inattention that was paid to President Obama's document, “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” created a situation that left our country vastly unprepared in handling a pandemic. According to Wright, the Trump administration "jettisoned the playbook" How would the adherence to this playbook changed the scenario of the months of unpreparedness in the United States?

Wright illustrates some of the reversals of advice given to the American citizenry, especially in the practice of masking. It is understandable how that advice could seem controversial, but with the way the disease has manifested itself and how much the scientific knowledge of that has changed, it is justifiable. If only the leadership of the country would have grasped that and embraced the practice instead of ridiculing it, deaths and serious illness may have been mitigates. Wright contends that the president acted not as a leader, but as a "saboteur." 

Countless times during the course of the book, the reader ponders the "what if" and "if only" feelings. At those times, it is hard not to become angry for what might have been. This chronicle of the first year of the pandemic is a must read to understand in a comprehensible way how we have lived and died through this terrible time.