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daeus 's review for:
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
by Michael Lewis
Solid Michael Lewis book. Really broke down where the non-vaccine social interventions to combat a pandemic came from and how unequipped America was to use them effectively.
Quotes
- "You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire."
- "You can keep mistakes from happening if you can identify the almost mistakes. This kind of changes how I view everything."
- "The model he’d built with his daughter showed that there was no difference between giving a person a vaccine and removing him or her from the social network: in each case, a person lost the ability to infect others. Yet all the expert talk was about how to speed the production and distribution of vaccines. No one seemed to be exploring the most efficient and least disruptive ways to remove people from social networks."
- "It shouldn’t be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That’s what they do well."
- "You know why I don't think they wanted to accept it? It's too terrifying.... local nobodies [public health officers] are really in charge.... there was no system of public health in the United States, just a patchwork of state and local health officers beholden to a greater or lesser degree to local elected officials. 3,500 separate entities that have been starved of resources for the past 40 years."
- "The goal of the health state officer in California is to have someone to fire."
- "The solution required someone in it to be brave, and the system didn't reward bravery.... it needed courage, and courage didn't pay." Note: changing civil servant positions from career civil servants to political appointees created some pretty perverse incentives (ie hide problems/avoid hard choices).
- "One measure of poverty is how little you have. Another is how difficult you find it to take advantage of what others try to give you."
Quotes
- "You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire."
- "You can keep mistakes from happening if you can identify the almost mistakes. This kind of changes how I view everything."
- "The model he’d built with his daughter showed that there was no difference between giving a person a vaccine and removing him or her from the social network: in each case, a person lost the ability to infect others. Yet all the expert talk was about how to speed the production and distribution of vaccines. No one seemed to be exploring the most efficient and least disruptive ways to remove people from social networks."
- "It shouldn’t be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That’s what they do well."
- "You know why I don't think they wanted to accept it? It's too terrifying.... local nobodies [public health officers] are really in charge.... there was no system of public health in the United States, just a patchwork of state and local health officers beholden to a greater or lesser degree to local elected officials. 3,500 separate entities that have been starved of resources for the past 40 years."
- "The goal of the health state officer in California is to have someone to fire."
- "The solution required someone in it to be brave, and the system didn't reward bravery.... it needed courage, and courage didn't pay." Note: changing civil servant positions from career civil servants to political appointees created some pretty perverse incentives (ie hide problems/avoid hard choices).
- "One measure of poverty is how little you have. Another is how difficult you find it to take advantage of what others try to give you."