The Premonition is Michael Lewis' new book on a group outside government who led our response to COVID. It is simply a great read.
McMurtry will be happy, the CDC is a giant punching bag. It is called variations of an academic institution with a mission to fight a war. The CDC is viewed as more wanting to study the enemy than fight the enemy.
Gavin Need one has a rough go in the book. He hired Sonia Angell to be state health director in 2019. Everyone thought it would be Charity Dean, who is one of the main focuses of the book. However Dean was White and Angell had a big track record working with minority groups. Angell had no experience and no interest in infection disease and largely followed the CDC.
One of the sections on Dean, long before COVID dealt with her interacting with the CDC over Hep B and viral meningitis. In both cases the CDC wax aghast she took action without waiting to confirm. Her point was that people would die if she waited.
But she admits jobs like hers, and the CDC, have a perverse incentive. If they do nothing and an outbreak happens, people will forgive them. If they act and an outbreak doesn't happen they will be blamed and fired. Everyone has an incentive to keep their head down and do nothing.
Trump is not mentioned often, bit the mentions are not kind. He wanted the federal government far removed from involvement, they could not be blamed for something they were not doing. He wanted case counts low, so he wanted little testing.
Some interesting things. Zuckerberg funded a genetics lab. They had the technology and offered to both test and genetic sequence positive cases for free. For free. Almost no one took them up. Some hospitals/government agencies did not want to be seen working with the Zuckerberg name. Some had a problem, Quest charged a lot and their contracts required them to be sole provider. My favorite, some hospitals could not use them because it was free. The hospital accounting system would not allow free entries.
The people in the book are fascinating, and outside the government (though some had worked for Bush). They held conference calls early on. One guy, Carter Mescher (audiobook, I may misspell that last name) seemed to be the leader of the group. He called himself a redneck epidemiologist. Very early on, in January, he knew China was lying. 1) they were building 1000 bed hospitals in days 2) we knew how many Chinese from Wuhan who travelled and were diagnosed. We knew how many travelled. The rate of infection in travellers was far higher than China was saying it was on the ground.
So government employees learned of these conference calls and sat in. Yes, even Dr Fauci. Charity Davis was saying she had no idea who was on these calls and never suspected until Ken Cuccinelli, Director of Homeland Security at that moment, broke in on her talking yelling at her she had to lock down California because he couldn't get any in the White House to do a thing about the virus.
Others were pressuring her to lock down CA, it was why she was added to the calls. But she couldn't, they did not realize she was #2 and lacked the authority and her boss refused to talk to her about COVID because her boss wanted to do what the CDC said.
A couple of the guys worked for Bush who demanded a plan for infectious disease. Bush is the only politician who comes out good (Carter, Ford, Reagan, and Obama get mentions). They discovered the current plan was to do nothing except wait for a vaccination. The reason was Philly in the Spanish flu. Philly had tried social distancing, it did not work. These two, the redneck epidemiologist being one, studied the outbreak. They discovered one thing, Philly waited too late. Other cities, like St Louis, acted well before Philly and had tremendously fewer cases and deaths. Philly waited until they were badly overrun. So the US containment plan became social distancing.
This leads to an error in COVID. They discovered flus are speed by....... Children. Kids do not socially distance. One spent days studying kids in schools. They are packed 3 to a 42 inch seat on a bus. At bus stops, they stand closer than the Seinfeld close-talker. Their desks are under 3 feet apart until high school where they become 3.5.
All that leads to one inescapable conclusion. Schools have to be closed. Now it turned out for reasons still not known, COVID does not spread through children. It will be interesting to see in future pandemics if we will see someone risk closing schools or not.
I have barely scratched the surface, people should read the book. Conservatives will love the portrayal of the government as far too slow and unwieldy. Liberals will probably find the Trump areas and the holes in the for profit healthcare model interesting.
And the Jasons surprisingly had an appearance.
McMurtry will be happy, the CDC is a giant punching bag. It is called variations of an academic institution with a mission to fight a war. The CDC is viewed as more wanting to study the enemy than fight the enemy.
Gavin Need one has a rough go in the book. He hired Sonia Angell to be state health director in 2019. Everyone thought it would be Charity Dean, who is one of the main focuses of the book. However Dean was White and Angell had a big track record working with minority groups. Angell had no experience and no interest in infection disease and largely followed the CDC.
One of the sections on Dean, long before COVID dealt with her interacting with the CDC over Hep B and viral meningitis. In both cases the CDC wax aghast she took action without waiting to confirm. Her point was that people would die if she waited.
But she admits jobs like hers, and the CDC, have a perverse incentive. If they do nothing and an outbreak happens, people will forgive them. If they act and an outbreak doesn't happen they will be blamed and fired. Everyone has an incentive to keep their head down and do nothing.
Trump is not mentioned often, bit the mentions are not kind. He wanted the federal government far removed from involvement, they could not be blamed for something they were not doing. He wanted case counts low, so he wanted little testing.
Some interesting things. Zuckerberg funded a genetics lab. They had the technology and offered to both test and genetic sequence positive cases for free. For free. Almost no one took them up. Some hospitals/government agencies did not want to be seen working with the Zuckerberg name. Some had a problem, Quest charged a lot and their contracts required them to be sole provider. My favorite, some hospitals could not use them because it was free. The hospital accounting system would not allow free entries.
The people in the book are fascinating, and outside the government (though some had worked for Bush). They held conference calls early on. One guy, Carter Mescher (audiobook, I may misspell that last name) seemed to be the leader of the group. He called himself a redneck epidemiologist. Very early on, in January, he knew China was lying. 1) they were building 1000 bed hospitals in days 2) we knew how many Chinese from Wuhan who travelled and were diagnosed. We knew how many travelled. The rate of infection in travellers was far higher than China was saying it was on the ground.
So government employees learned of these conference calls and sat in. Yes, even Dr Fauci. Charity Davis was saying she had no idea who was on these calls and never suspected until Ken Cuccinelli, Director of Homeland Security at that moment, broke in on her talking yelling at her she had to lock down California because he couldn't get any in the White House to do a thing about the virus.
Others were pressuring her to lock down CA, it was why she was added to the calls. But she couldn't, they did not realize she was #2 and lacked the authority and her boss refused to talk to her about COVID because her boss wanted to do what the CDC said.
A couple of the guys worked for Bush who demanded a plan for infectious disease. Bush is the only politician who comes out good (Carter, Ford, Reagan, and Obama get mentions). They discovered the current plan was to do nothing except wait for a vaccination. The reason was Philly in the Spanish flu. Philly had tried social distancing, it did not work. These two, the redneck epidemiologist being one, studied the outbreak. They discovered one thing, Philly waited too late. Other cities, like St Louis, acted well before Philly and had tremendously fewer cases and deaths. Philly waited until they were badly overrun. So the US containment plan became social distancing.
This leads to an error in COVID. They discovered flus are speed by....... Children. Kids do not socially distance. One spent days studying kids in schools. They are packed 3 to a 42 inch seat on a bus. At bus stops, they stand closer than the Seinfeld close-talker. Their desks are under 3 feet apart until high school where they become 3.5.
All that leads to one inescapable conclusion. Schools have to be closed. Now it turned out for reasons still not known, COVID does not spread through children. It will be interesting to see in future pandemics if we will see someone risk closing schools or not.
I have barely scratched the surface, people should read the book. Conservatives will love the portrayal of the government as far too slow and unwieldy. Liberals will probably find the Trump areas and the holes in the for profit healthcare model interesting.
And the Jasons surprisingly had an appearance.