The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

no one had really seen what was unusual about schools, at least from the point of view of the pandemic strategist. It had taken the Glasses’ model to point it out. Why? Carter wondered. Why hadn’t they seen it? Then it struck him. They saw it all with adult eyes. They forgot the world that their kids live in, and that they once lived in. Adults ima

The new models of disease, slow and unwieldy though they were, gave Richard hope. D.A. Henderson, and the people at the CDC, along with pretty much everyone else in the public-health sector, thought that the models had nothing to offer; but they were missing the point. They, too, used models. They, too, depended on abstractions to inform their judg

“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

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

On a Red Dawn phone call in early March, she was laying out her ideas about what California and every state in the country should do when a new voice came on the line. “This is Ken,” it said. Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force. “He said, ‘Charity, you need to push these th

“When you go into the details of the cases, you see it’s not bad people,” he said. “It’s bad systems. When the systems depend on human vigilance, they will fail.”

His was the most interesting story, at least to Carter. At 5:55 p.m., with the fire just a minute away and rushing toward him at ever greater speed, he’d lit a second fire, up the hill he needed to climb. As his fire burned the grass in front of him, he walked into it and threw himself onto the hot ashes. He’d called for his men first to abandon th

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

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