The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

He also set out to learn everything he could about the inner workings of the human mind, and where and why it was prone to err. He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,” he later recalled. “Not the usual owner’s manual, but an owner’s manual th

Henderson might have left it at that, but for some reason he couldn’t. A month later he wrote a scathing three-page, single-spaced reply. It bothered him that this professor held himself out as a student of battlefield decisions without understanding their most important quality, uncertainty. “I have found that there is an order of magnitude differ

To Richard’s way of thinking, the fact that the decision happened to have worked out did not mean it was the right decision; in a funny way, it was alarming that it had worked out, as it created a false sense of confidence in the process that had rendered it. In late September he noted that others sensed this, too. An idea that has gained currency

“Deciding on a swine flu program is like placing a bet without knowing the odds,” the authors concluded, without acknowledging that not deciding on a swine flu program was also placing a bet, also without knowing the odds. The odds were never knowable. The authors never considered the interesting counterfactual: Given the uncertainty inherent in th

But the shift inside the CDC that had begun with the Swine Flu Affair had led it to become a different sort of place. “Now I understood why the CDC was so admired,” said Charity. “It was because of people like him.” But Sencer had also exposed the price of bravery. After Sencer—or after Foege—the CDC’s relationship to disease control had changed in

He had time on his hands again and spent some of it thinking about the next pandemic. “I walked away from that one saying, ‘Next time this isn’t going to be easy,’ ” he said. “The whole thing assumed you would know how bad the pandemic was. And that was a really bad assumption. This fog, this not knowing, is such a big part of it. You almost need t

Her new husband complained to the church elders that his wife was spending all her time working. “He told me I was being disobedient by working so hard,” recalled Charity. “And they agreed with him. They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders

The big theme of her book would be the power of storytelling. It had taken Lisa, Richard, and Carter some time to see that they were in a war of competing narratives, and that whoever had the best narrative would win.

Carter now sensed when she might have changed her mind about him. Early on, they’d been discussing the pandemic plan, and he had shared with her his thoughts about maps. They were also his thoughts about plans, as a plan is a kind of map: a map of what you plan to do. He told her a story about some troops who’d gotten lost in the Alps. “They’re in