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4.3 AVERAGE
4.3 AVERAGE
adventurous
informative
medium-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Instructing his wife to get him an appointment at his children’s school, then amazed at how kids school experience is so different than the everyday of adults.
Get your head out of your ass.
Too bad the teen and county public health doctor didn’t continue being highlighted. I couldn’t wade through his hubris to find out if he ever circled back to them.
Get your head out of your ass.
Too bad the teen and county public health doctor didn’t continue being highlighted. I couldn’t wade through his hubris to find out if he ever circled back to them.
I KNEW IT!! I'm so glad that I read this book, because there were times during the pandemic that I thought I must be going crazy, listening to pundits. I hoped that there were smart people in charge who knew at least what I had figured out, and hopefully more.
" By the third week in January, Charity Dean, like Carter Mecher, did not believe that the risk to the American people was low. She thought that the virus was already spreading exponentially inside the United States". Page 196. Thank you Charity Dean!! I was working as a charge nurse, and part of my job was assisting with bed utilization and planning. Monitoring the census, the planned admissions, the amount of staff. Knowing about Acuity and numbers of nurses needed. Suddenly I'm watching the Chinese construction of 1,000 bed hospitals over the period of days, and was all, "Whoa...Dude!" They built the amount of hospital beds that we had in Los Angeles, in one weekend. What the hell was prompting the construction of 1,000 beds!? My daughter with her degree in Mathematics/Environmental science, and myself in Nursing, put our heads together, and we knew that this was the Spanish flu again, that keeping our "wildfire masks" in good supply, of watching all indicators, was essential to survival. It was disaster response. But when I talked to staff about monitoring for Chinese travel, some of them laughed at me. Not realizing that business people in Los Angeles alone, fly to China daily. Maybe a few times a year. Not understanding bullet trains. It made me want to hit my head against the wall. And we got a patient who had been in Wuhan, and I got yelled at for putting them in isolation. By a doctor. And I went toe to toe with her. Guess who got Covid? The laughing staff, and the doctor. Not me. knock on wood. Because this is biology, and this is a species, and it is life, not fashion, or home decor. The virus didn't just get tired of it's tour and lay down and die. I thank Michael Lewis for writing this book, it confirmed my scientific studies, concerns, evidence based patient care planning, and that I wasn't insane.
" By the third week in January, Charity Dean, like Carter Mecher, did not believe that the risk to the American people was low. She thought that the virus was already spreading exponentially inside the United States". Page 196. Thank you Charity Dean!! I was working as a charge nurse, and part of my job was assisting with bed utilization and planning. Monitoring the census, the planned admissions, the amount of staff. Knowing about Acuity and numbers of nurses needed. Suddenly I'm watching the Chinese construction of 1,000 bed hospitals over the period of days, and was all, "Whoa...Dude!" They built the amount of hospital beds that we had in Los Angeles, in one weekend. What the hell was prompting the construction of 1,000 beds!? My daughter with her degree in Mathematics/Environmental science, and myself in Nursing, put our heads together, and we knew that this was the Spanish flu again, that keeping our "wildfire masks" in good supply, of watching all indicators, was essential to survival. It was disaster response. But when I talked to staff about monitoring for Chinese travel, some of them laughed at me. Not realizing that business people in Los Angeles alone, fly to China daily. Maybe a few times a year. Not understanding bullet trains. It made me want to hit my head against the wall. And we got a patient who had been in Wuhan, and I got yelled at for putting them in isolation. By a doctor. And I went toe to toe with her. Guess who got Covid? The laughing staff, and the doctor. Not me. knock on wood. Because this is biology, and this is a species, and it is life, not fashion, or home decor. The virus didn't just get tired of it's tour and lay down and die. I thank Michael Lewis for writing this book, it confirmed my scientific studies, concerns, evidence based patient care planning, and that I wasn't insane.
I’m actually shocked that this book is out before the pandemic is over. It’s good but it doesn’t have an ending.
What it does have is some really good reflections on what government did during the various pandemics of the last 50 years.
What it did right and wrong. And how some organizations (CDC) are so politically risk averse that they no longer can be trusted to do the right thing.
There are some heroes but they’re not in the usual places. One of them is George W. Bush. Yes. I’m shocked too.
I wish there was more of an ending and that Lewis spent time talking about later pandemic stories.
But it was a very good book.
What it does have is some really good reflections on what government did during the various pandemics of the last 50 years.
What it did right and wrong. And how some organizations (CDC) are so politically risk averse that they no longer can be trusted to do the right thing.
There are some heroes but they’re not in the usual places. One of them is George W. Bush. Yes. I’m shocked too.
I wish there was more of an ending and that Lewis spent time talking about later pandemic stories.
But it was a very good book.
This is the type of narrative nonfiction I love: a real-life story that reads like a novel and focuses on just one little aspect of a larger problem. The connections that those in the world of public health made with each other seem almost happenstance, but as has been said throughout the pandemic, it did not have to be that way. With no highly functional system in place (still!) these stories will repeat themselves over and over in varying ways for our lifetime and beyond as long as public health continues to be tied closely to the realm of politics.
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
Brilliant and scary. Michael Lewis makes even the acknowledgments a great read. Wonderful storyteller, disturbing story about the failure of our government (no, not just Trump) and the CDC to follow through on the already created and approved plan of pandemic response, told through the experiences of some iconoclastic, wonderful characters.
Part I read like a gripping thriller: From Bush reading 1918 and realizing they needed a plan, to a small group of scrappy nerds and practitioners who kept working on it and occasionally using aspects of their plan, to the need to really ACT on the plan and seeing the way the public health system was so fractured, decentralized, and unsupported. (And yes, in March 2022, we're about to see this play out again, taking away the targeted layering systems that are needed -- no masks, distancing, tests or money for treatment, dismembered all at once. Hope the company that Charity Dean, Carter Mecher, and Joe DeRisi can help us out this time around.). If the book had ended here, I'd have given it a solid 5.
Parts II and III were more scattershot and meandering; snippets of some ancillary tales including the evolution of the failings that we're seeing from the CDC now, dating back to the late 70's. Interesting and relevant, but these sections felt choppy and disconnected from Part I.
Parts II and III were more scattershot and meandering; snippets of some ancillary tales including the evolution of the failings that we're seeing from the CDC now, dating back to the late 70's. Interesting and relevant, but these sections felt choppy and disconnected from Part I.
informative
reflective
fast-paced