If you want to understand how the country with “the greatest public healthcare system in the world ™” managed to get 600,000 people killed in a little over a year, read Michael Lewis’s The Premonition. Brilliantly written and filled with remarkable characters and stories, you won’t be able to put to it down.
Unlike other works that focus on the early days of the pandemic, this one doesn’t harp on the sheer incompetence of the Trump administration, which, after all, was plain for everyone to see. (But not to fear, the Trumpists are hardly ignored or get off easy.) Instead, it tells the story of some brilliant American experts who had been planning their entire lives to fight a pandemic and how, due to an incredibly sclerotic and chaotic public health system, weren’t able to do anything to contain the virus when that may have still been possible.
As with so many other awful problems this country faces — racism, rampant cronyism, inequality, and political corruption — Trump turbocharged a disastrous system. But the rot goes far beyond one awful actor and his henchmen.
And as with so many other amazing people this country currently has — from Ocasio-Cortez to Stacey Abrams to Letitia James — the public health system has unforgettable, deeply competent characters whose stories will stay with you long after the book is finished.