The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve read a quite a few of Michael Lewis’s previous books and so it was an easy choice to pick up this one. The topic this time is pandemics, and once again, he does not disappoint his readers. We start with a middle school student’s science fair project, which leads to some mathematical modeling of pandemics, and eventually to the interest by President George W Bush in the influenza pandemic of 1918.

Bush created a small group to look at how should the US respond to a pandemic. And this small group of doctors eventually became “the Wolverines” who kept in touch as they changed jobs. And when the Covid19 pandemic began the Wolverines were on top of it, but as the blurb on the book jacket says “…they did not have official permission to implement their work.”

It’s a very interesting and compelling book. I certainly learned a lot about the health care establishment in the US, and how the CDC fits in, or doesn’t fit in. The one issue I have with the book is that it just kind of drifts to an end in the middle of 2020 – the presidential election and the vaccine rollout are still in the future at that point. So there is no big finish, but I still recommend this book. It’s an interesting look at the US response to the pandemic.