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cal_jessamine's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.5
wunkymatts's review against another edition
4.0
Memory is a funny thing, isn't it? COVID is still so recent, so fresh and (most concerningly) possibly not over. And yet reading again about the early days of 2020 reminded me how different things are now and just exactly what it was that we went through.
Shridhar takes on a vast and complex subject matter with enormous confidence. Some of the chapters were interesting from a scientific point of view. These were facts and processes that I didn't know and it was fascinating to learn about them. There is such a wealth of information that I imagine she could have written a while series of books. I very much admire the way she examined and contrasted competing theories and took the honest but difficult step of admitting time and time again that there is no 'one' right answer. It was a welcome tonic after being subject to the ridiculous bawling of the British gutter press and the infantilisation peddled by our politicians.
The book pulls no punches. Shridhar lays down in black and white how political decisions cost lives and economies. This is not always easy to read, but this is by no means a hopeless book. Every chapter is infused with reasonable, workable solutions to the problems we faced.
At times this book is very dense. Even with my background in primary care nursing and public health there are some very big and complex ideas, but Shridhar never assumes the reader won't understand them and explains them well. This is one of the books greatest strengths. The other is the clear eyed view it takes. We have been in the middle of this thing for so long it takes an act of will to stand back, to try to understand. This book helped me do that.
Shridhar takes on a vast and complex subject matter with enormous confidence. Some of the chapters were interesting from a scientific point of view. These were facts and processes that I didn't know and it was fascinating to learn about them. There is such a wealth of information that I imagine she could have written a while series of books. I very much admire the way she examined and contrasted competing theories and took the honest but difficult step of admitting time and time again that there is no 'one' right answer. It was a welcome tonic after being subject to the ridiculous bawling of the British gutter press and the infantilisation peddled by our politicians.
The book pulls no punches. Shridhar lays down in black and white how political decisions cost lives and economies. This is not always easy to read, but this is by no means a hopeless book. Every chapter is infused with reasonable, workable solutions to the problems we faced.
At times this book is very dense. Even with my background in primary care nursing and public health there are some very big and complex ideas, but Shridhar never assumes the reader won't understand them and explains them well. This is one of the books greatest strengths. The other is the clear eyed view it takes. We have been in the middle of this thing for so long it takes an act of will to stand back, to try to understand. This book helped me do that.
capacitorofflux's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
archytas's review
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
I've strongly recommended this book to three people in the week since I have finished it - that's really high for any book, and especially so for a dense non-fiction read I'm well aware won't appeal to most people. It's also high for a book with a very big problem: which is that it was finished in August/September, before Omicron hit, but published well after. This has been addressed in a rather sad Afterward, but it does rather loom over the rest of the narrative. Despite all this, I think this is a book anyone who wants to understand what the hell happened to the world in the last two years should start with.
Refreshingly, Sridhar doesn't make this a polemical book. She has views about what measures would have been best implemented at different times, but one of her main points is that we failed in allowing a reasoned discussion of difference. She details the cost of both the spread of the virus and of lockdowns themselves. This is most upsetting around school attendance - Sridhar covers the huge impact on girls' education globally, for example, with the estimate of 11 million girls who left education altogether and have not returned.
The chapters are organised by geographically and chronologically. The early content focuses on China, then Europe and East Asia, then the global spread. Sridhar takes a deep dive into particular exemplars (Czechoslovakia, Senegal, Kerala are among the most interesting, but also NZ) to show how different responses had different results. At each point she details different points of view, conclusions and where evidence is debated.
The narrative is clinical, but emotions occasionally peak through. Sridhar is angry at Downing Street, covering meticulously how disastrous their early assumptions were. She is deeply worried by China's government, whose early responses could have led to a very different global picture as she shows it. She is disappointed in the absence of global cooperation - which could not only have mediated the impact on the most vulnerable, but was also our main chance of actual eradication of the disease. Much of the narrative is driven by the dynamics of a race - with our health services and governments trying to manage while medical researchers raced to perfect vaccines faster than the virus could mutate to bypass them. She admits in the afterward that ultimately, Omicron - a milder strain but one infectious enough to run rampant in a vaccination population - arrived before the world was vaccinated, ultimately ensuring we will be living with Covid for some time. It is a defeated end - mediated yes, by the fact that our vaccinations have drastically lowered deaths, long term complications and health system impacts - but still one looking at terrible economic, social and health losses, and immense numbers of deaths. She also warns that this will happen again - that our global society, and the destruction of natural habitats for animals, means repeated new infections.
A friend, hearing a radio segment about the book which debated whether the title was true or whether "we are all ultimately virus food" asked me if I was pessimistic. I realised I didn't know which is the pessimistic viewpoint - that this pandemic was preventable but our systems, structures and biases meant we couldn't prevent such a bad outcome, or the "virus food" one. I think in the end, the latter is more comforting and the former more true.
Ultimately, Sridhar however is focused and concrete. She suggests, for example, that we can't trust our nation-states to act outside of their own domestic political situations. So she advocates strongly for building vaccine and research facilities in Africa and other regions currently without them. Rather than a failed shared vaccine solution, she argues the capacity to produce and vaccinate their own populations must be stood up. Modelling - which she regards as a major failure during the pandemic - must acknowledge that race and poverty are major indicators of health risk - not just health conditions (and that health workers are largely drawn from highly vulnerable populations). We need diversity in our leadership, and governments can't rely on mathematical models without advisory panels which embody that diversity. And finally, that the impacts of any measures are vastly different between elites and the rest. If we don't face our problems square on, then we will indeed, be virus food.