Michael Lewis' latest: An Unputdownable Pandemic Story

 I recently finished this one:

And it was so good, I read it again almost immediately!

The book is an interwoven bunch of stories of the people who were behind the working parts of the government's pandemic response, including the "social distancing" stuff we've all been doing the past year plus. It turns out the initial reading of the 1918 flu pandemic showed that social distancing didn't work, but these researchers looked at the original sources. They found that it didn't work in Philadelphia because the city leaders waited too long to put it in practice.

I'll spare you the actual picture of Philadelphia in those days, where "bodies were stacked up like cordwood."

In St. Louis, where they got going on it faster, it worked much better.

But they had the same stuff going on then that we have today, with business leaders lobbying to relax social distancing rules.The cities that caved into this experienced big second waves of disease; those that didn't, avoided them.

The star of the book is Dr. Charity Dean, who was a public health physician who was tasked with keeping track of tuberculosis and hepatitis C in Santa Barbara county at the beginning of the book, then has a big role to play later when the pandemic starts.

Just get a copy of the book! You can get one from your local library in about a year ... or if you're in more of a hurry, it's  available wherever books are sold ... and where they haven't yet run out.

This is my favorite work of nonfiction for at least the last 5 years. Thank you, Michael Lewis!