The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, whose best-selling thriller The End of the October all but predicted our current pandemic, comes another momentous account, this time of COVID-19: its origins, its myriad repercussions, and the ongoing fight to contain it

Beginning with the absolutely critical first moments of the outbreak in China, and ending with an epilogue on the vaccine rollout and the unprecedented events between the election of Joseph Biden and his inauguration, Lawrence Wright's The Plague Year surges forward with essential information--and fascinating historical parallels--examining the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wright takes us inside the CDC, where the first round of faulty test kits cost America precious time; inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger's early alarm about the virus was met with great skepticism; into a COVID ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from Little Africa, South Carolina; into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs; and even inside the human body, diving deep into the science of just how the virus and vaccines function, with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaxxer movement.

In turns steely eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, comical, and always precise, Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew. His full accounting does honor to the medical professionals around the country who've risked their lives to fight the virus, revealing America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Science, Health, Audiobook, Medicine

560 pages, Paperback

First published December 28, 2020

About the author

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and three National Magazine Awards.

His latest book, The Human Scale , is a sweeping, timely thriller, in which a Palestinian-American FBI agent teams up with a hardline Israeli cop to solve the murder of the Israeli police chief in Gaza. According to The New York Times, “Wright succeeds in this complex, deeply felt work.”

He is the author of 11 nonfiction books. His book about the rise of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), was published to immediate and widespread acclaim. It has been translated into 25 languages and won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was made into a series for Hulu in 2018, starring Jeff Daniels, Alec Baldwin, and Tahar Rahim.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Knopf, 2013) was a New York Times bestseller. Wright and director Alex Gibney turned it into an HBO documentary, which won three Emmys, including best documentary. Wright and Gibney also teamed up to produce another Emmy-winning documentary, for Showtime, about the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

In addition to The Human Scale, Wright has three other novels: Noriega: God’s Favorite (Simon and Schuster, 2000) which was made into a Showtime movie starring Bob Hoskins; The End of October (Knopf, 2020), a bestseller about a viral pandemic that came out right at the beginning of COVID; Mr. Texas (Knopf, 2023), which has been optioned as a limited streaming series.

In 2006, Wright premiered his first one-man play, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” at The New Yorker Festival, which led to a sold-out six-week run off-Broadway, before traveling to Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. It was made into a documentary film of the same name, directed by Alex Gibney, for HBO.

Before he wrote the novel, Wright wrote and performed a one-man show also called The Human Scale, about the standoff between Israel and Hamas over the abduction of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. The Public Theater in New York produced the play, which ran for a month off-Broadway in 2010, before moving to the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv. Many of the ideas developed in that play later evolved into the novel of the same name, published 15 years later.

In addition to his one-man productions, Wright has written five other plays that have enjoyed productions around the country, including Camp David, about the Carter, Begin, and Sadat summit in 1978; and Cleo, about the making of the movie Cleopatra.

Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Society of American Historians, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves as the keyboard player in the Austin-based blues band, WhoDo.

Reviews

[Sharon Orlopp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lawrence Wright has written a fabulous chronological history of the global COVID pandemic, with a primary focus on the US, in his book The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid. I highly recommend it!

One of the early quotes in the book is from Dr. Li, "A healthy society shouldn't have only one voice." During emergency situations, it's critical to listen to information from many sources in order to make the best decisions.

There was a study done on the 1918 flu that showed cities who reacted quickly, closed schools, and banned large gatherings had fewer deaths. The strategy for success was early, layered and long. Matthew Pottinger, US National Deputy Security Advisor, shared the 1918 flu study with White House colleagues at the early stages of the pandemic.

After 30 days of the first case in the US, only 500 tests had been done on people with symptoms. Contrast that with South Korea who had their first case one day before the first case in the US--in their first 30 days, they had tested 65,000 people. China indicated they were testing 1.6 million people each week.

An interesting analogy in the book is that the CDC was like a small-time brewery when what was needed was an Anheiser-Busch type of company to manufacture and distribute COVID tests. Bureaucratic inertia, compounded by scientific incompetence handicapped the US response.

Rather than a national response and plan, President Trump told governors on a call that they had to try to find their own ventilators, respirators, N95 masks and other PPE. Washington state Governor Jay Inslee told Trump on this call, "I don't want you to be the backup quarterback here. We need you to be Tom Brady." Trump told reporters that the federal government is not a shipping clerk. Yet when governors paid for and ordered ventilators, respirators, and N95 masks, the federal government seized those items at the ports.

Some of the facts that are in the book include:
* 94% of all COVID deaths in the US had comorbidity factors
* Over 3,000 healthcare workers in the US who treated COVID patients died from COVID (my personal GP passed away in March 2020 from COVID after treating patients with COVID)
* Seattle had one of the lowest death rates from COVID for a large metro city due to their early and prolonged restrictions---64 deaths per 100,000. Comparatively, NY had 294 per 100k; Los Angeles had 201 deaths per 100k; Detroit had 202 deaths per 100k.
* The US average deaths from COVID was 135 per 100k. Canada was at 54 per 100k.
*By the end of 2020, deaths increased by 15% in the US making it the deadliest year in history.
* Life expectancy in the US dropped by one year; the largest drop since WWII.
* According to the Lowy Institute, the US ranked 94 out of 98 countries on managing the pandemic.

Those statistics are sobering.

The book closes with great insights about the importance of experience and leadership.

Highly recommend!

[Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently I’ve read several books that have explored the COVID-19 story so far. This book is more science oriented than the other books I have read. The others were more focused on how we responded to the crisis. That information is also included in this book, book but in addition in delves more into the origin of COVID-19. It also describes other plagues. This author also wrote the novel “The End of October”, which I enjoyed. He has obviously been thinking about pandemics for a while, so he brings a lot of prior knowledge to this book.

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written and illuminating look at America's response and handling of Covid-19. It was interesting to see it all put together in this book. Mr. Wright covers a wide range of topics dealing with the pandemic, from the political to the historical and everything in between.

[CoachJim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eighty percent of the Covid deaths are over the age of sixty-five *** The disparity in vulnerability means that each generation experiences a different pandemic. The case fatality rate overall is 2 percent, but for people eighteen and under it is .02 percent, and for people over seventy it’s 18.8 percent. Why be surprised by the anger — compounded with envy — that the elderly feel when they see younger people mingling, freely breathing disease into the air.

***

The devaluation of elderly lives was evident in the low standards of care in so many nursing homes, where 40 percent of all U.S. deaths occurred, despite accounting for only 8 percent of the cases. Yes, the elderly are more vulnerable and more likely to have underlying conditions, but one of the risk factors was incompetent management and insufficient staffing.
The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright (pages 128-129)

Anyone with an IQ over the legal voting age knows that Trump mismanaged this pandemic. I’ll avoid mentioning any of the examples listed in this book. There are plenty of other books out right now dealing with that nonsense.

The remainder of this book is of various anecdotes from hospitals, doctors, and administrators as they dealt with Covid, and the difficulties and dangers they faced. They had to deal with a stunning lack of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and diagnostic tests. There are also stories of the economic and racial inequality of the impact that this pandemic had on communities.

The title of the book refers to the year of the plague, which allows the author to mention several social incidents of the year, for instance, the social unrest after the death of George Floyd. There is an interesting observation that even though the officers involved in the George Floyd death knew they were being recorded on cell phone videos they acted as if they didn’t care. This sort of assumption of impunity by the police has to be one of the more telling aspects of the relationship between the Black community and the police.

The author notes there were three missed opportunities to curb the pandemic. The first was lost when China refused to be open about what was happening in that country. The second opportunity also failed when an accurate, timely test was delayed being developed. The third opportunity — the easiest, cheapest, and perhaps the most effective — was a mask mandate. Here the failure was a result of a lack of both leadership and compliance. During the Spanish Flu pandemic cities that implemented non-pharmaceutical interventions were successful at curbing the virus.

I read an article recently about all the new books coming out dealing with the events of the past 18 months or so. The article, and I cannot remember where I saw it, referred to these books as “Rough Draft History”. It listed as reasons that not enough time had passed to gain a good perspective, and also that the two major events, the Trump fiasco and the Covid pandemic, were not over yet. It compared this to writing a history of World War II in 1943, prior to D-Day.

My impression is that this book was rushed out to catch the wave of these new books. It lacked some coherence that might have been fixed with more time and editing. This was most apparent in the use of anecdotes which many times did not add anything to the story.

Having noted these criticisms the last chapter, Epilogue, is a well written and informative chapter. In that chapter the author sums up many of the difficulties that hindered the containment of this virus; the stumbles with the vaccine characterized the response to the coronavirus from the start. Although not specifically mentioned, the Delta Variant is a mutant of Covid, and there is a discussion of some of the other mutants. The fact that mutants of the virus were being found raised the fear that the “coronavirus was evolving into a deadlier version of the flu or the common cold, which were constantly changing, dodging the body’s immune system.” The question then is posed as to how to fight these mutants. A Dr. Brooks is quoted as saying the best way is to “suppress replication, and that means stopping infections.” “Stopping transmission blocks the opportunity for viral mutation.” And the only means we have is a vaccine. “It’s a race,” Brooks said. “We’ve got to get people vaccinated before more of these mutations occur.” (Page 268)

World War I which is remembered and memorialized killed some 57,000 Americans soldiers. The Spanish Flu is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of between 500,000 and 750,000 Americans and, until recently, is generally forgotten.

It is said that history is the revenge of the dead on the living. The Spanish Flu occurred 100 years ago and there have been other potential plagues since then, but in 2020 we just watched as over 600,000 fellow Americans have died.

Imagine a foreign adversary invaded America and killed half a million people. How would the country respond? No doubt the most powerful military in the history of the world would annihilate the invader. Partisan differences would fall away as the American people joined as one to defend their countrymen. History would mark the loss of life, unmatched by any military conflict in our country except the Civil War; but perhaps it would also note that it was the moment when the United States returned to its senses and concentrated on making the world a safer place.

But our invader is not a human adversary; it is nature that we struggled against, and in the face of this conflict there is a curious passivity. We were poorly armed for this contest, due to decades of cutbacks in our healthcare system.
***
Our military preparedness was unparalleled. We were ready to go to war with any other nation, but we were missing the fact that our own country was at war with itself, and that our weakened, broken society was easy prey for the contagion that was inevitably going to come.
The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright (Page 269)

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for the New Yorker who in addition to authoring ten non-fiction books is a playwright and screenwriter. Published in 2021, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid is a brisk, informative look at how Covid-19 developed and affected health, politics and culture in the first months of the pandemic. This wasn't a comprehensive dive into the pandemic and even longer books could focus purely on the medical, public policy or sociological chronology, but I admire and trust Wright's reporting and learned a lot.

-- Covid-19 arrived in America at a vulnerable moment in the nation's history. The country was undergoing a wrenching political realignment, brought to a head by the 2016 election of Donald Trump, whose policies on trade, deficit, alliances and immigration were at odds with traditional Republican conservatism. His election pulled the country further into a cataclysm of identity politics, shrinking the GOP into a pool of aging white voters who felt disparaged, resentful and left behind. The #MeToo movement had ignited an edgy dialogue between the sexes. As the stock market soared, long-delayed questions of income disparity and racial justice were pressing forward. Every dissonant chord among the parties, the races, and the genders was amplified within the echo chambers the fractured communities had made of themselves.

-- Matt Pottinger handed out a study of the 1918 flu pandemic to his colleagues in the White House, indicating the differing outcomes between the experiences of Philadelphia and St. Louis--a clear example of the importance of leadership, transparency, and following the best scientific counsel. His brother, Paul, the infectious-disease doctor at the University of Washington Medical Center, kept him appraised of the ravaging infection in the nursing homes in the Seattle area. "I'm watching [a patient] die of this now," Paul texted from a nursing home. "He beshat himself, flooded his toilet, caused a flood, and the shitwater dripped into the floor below. A literal deadly shitshow."

-- For most people, including politicians, the threat in February still appeared small. More than a month had passed between the first confirmed case in the United States and the first known death. "It's going to disappear," President Trump promised. "One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear."

As the president was making this prediction, 175 employees of the biotech firm Biogen were heading home. They had gathered on a wintry weekend at the Marriott Long Wharf hotel in Boston Harbor. Many had traveled from other states and foreign countries. At the time, only fifteen confirmed cases of Covid-19 had been diagnosed in the U.S.--just one of them in Massachusetts. Among the international attendees were several from Italy, which was under lockdown in the northern part of the country. The employees sat close together in the banquet rooms during sessions and socialized at the end of the day. They rode on elevators together and spent time in the gym. On Sunday, as the conference closed, they went home, carrying the virus to Boston or its suburbs; they journeyed to various states, including Florida, North Carolina, and Indiana; they flew back to Singapore, Australia, Sweden, and Slovakia. Soon, many fell ill.

-- One of Senator Patty Murray's relatives had been in the Kirkland facility a few years before. "It was within a short amount of time I began hearing from my family and friends, 'Oh my gosh, I've got the worst flu I ever had, I got this cold that won't go away, this cough that won't stop, my kids are sick.'" Some of her own family were extremely ill. Murray told them, "Go get a test," but they replied, "I can't get a test. I've asked my doctor. I've asked the public health people in the county. I've called the state health people--nobody has these tests." Her state was in turmoil.

At the end of February, the Senate Democratic caucus went on a retreat in Baltimore. Murray received a text from her daughter, whose children were in school in the same neighborhood as the initial nursing home outbreak. "They closed the schools," her daughter said. "Kids are sick, teachers are sick. This is really frightening." Murray called the school principal, who told her 20 percent of the children in the school were ill.

Murray told her colleagues, "My granddaughter's school closed today. This is coming for you."

-- The New York City Health Department felt muzzled by the mayor. "Every message that we want to get out to the public needs to go through him, and they end up getting nixed. City Hall continues to sideline and neuter the country's premier public health department," a health official complained in early March. "He doesn't get it," the official wrote in another memo. "Not convinced there's a volcano about to blow beneath us." Insurrection was afoot. There was talk of delivering an ultimatum to the mayor. "Either pivot to pandemic planning today or they start to deal with a health department that won't follow his orders." Mayor Bill de Blasio was under the spell of an email from Mitchell Katz, the CEO of New York's sprawling municipal healthcare system, who counseled the mayor to keep the city open. "Canceling large gatherings gives people the wrong impression of this illness," Katz wrote. "If it is not safe to go to a conference, why is it safe to go to the hospital or ride the subway?" He argued, one the one hand, that the "terrible problem" in Italy was unlikely to happen in New York and, on the other, that many New Yorkers were going to get infected anyway. "Greater than 99 percent will recover without harm. Once people recover they will have immunity. The immunity will protect the herd." The mayor then went on Morning Joe and said a number of things he would soon regret, starting with his pledge to keep the schools open, even if students fell ill. "If you're under fifty and you're healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there's very little threat here."

-- On a sunny afternoon in April I went for a jog on a school track near my home in Austin. A group of young women were running time trials in the hundred-meter dash. They were the fastest people I had ever seen. Occasionally, as I came around a curve, I'd pull even with one of them just as she was taking off. It was like Wile E. Coyote eating Road Runner's dust. Their feet rarely touched the track. There was an element of flight.

"What school do you guys run for?" I asked one of them, who was cooling off.

"Oh, it's not a school," she said, and then added, "We're Olympians."

Instead of competing in Tokyo, here they were, on a middle-school track in Austin, trying to maintain peak condition as they waited for the games to be rescheduled. So many dreams had been deferred or abandoned--weddings canceled, funerals avoided, high school musicals called off, vacation plans dropped, and businesses closed. After seeing what happened to New Orleans following Mardi Gras, the mayor of Austin shut down South by Southwest, one of the biggest sources of revenue in the city. My niece Elizabeth Shapiro fronts a ten-piece jazz band in L.A., Lizzy & the Triggermen, and SXSW was going to be her big breakthrough. There might be other chances, but would the band even survive the shutdown?

-- One can speculate on the farce of a man living in a basement of a vacuum shop nominating himself to overturn the social order of the state, but the prospect of a total reversal of fortunes animated his dream. Adam Fox was unwanted--by his ex-wife, by his girlfriend, by the society that wouldn't give him a prestigious job--and the distance between who he was and who he wanted to be was so great it could only be closed by force. Governor Whitmer was a woman, attractive, powerful, popular. There was talk she might be picked as Joe Biden's running mate. Fox would strip her of her authority. He would take charge, subjugate her. It was a kind of rape fantasy, one that Whitmer would recognize: she had been raped when she was young.

-- At the beginning of the pandemic, China's unprecedented lockdown, compared to the initial halting reaction in Italy, suggested that autocratic systems had an unbeatable advantage in dealing with a contagion like that of SARS-CoV-2. Over time, however, democratic regimes found their footing and did marginally better than authoritarian ones. Advanced countries performed better than developing ones, but not by as much as might have been expected. Due to the high volume of air travel, richer countries were quickly overwhelmed, while poorer countries had more time to prepare for the onslaught. High-tech medical advantages proved of little use when the main tools for countering the spread of the disease were social distancing, hand washing, and masks. This can be seen in the rankings by the Lowry Institute of the performance of countries managing the pandemic. The top ten countries are:

New Zealand
Vietnam
Taiwan
Thailand
Cyprus
Rwanda
Iceland
Australia
Latvia
Sri Lanka

The United States ranked number 94 out of 98, between Bolivia and Iran. China was not included in the rankings because of the lack of transparency in its testing.

What I appreciated most about The Plague Year were the stories Wright shares illustrating that Covid-19 had a profound effect on society that goes deeper than a bad outbreak of the flu. Wright devotes many pages to the George Floyd murder and the protests of August 2020. I didn't know that Floyd had lost his security job in the shutdown and was killed for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. Covid contributed to Floyd's death and the displacement of so many more lives of people like me, who as of today, a Pfizer vaccine and two boosters later, hasn't gotten sick. I recommend this book for those who enjoy Wright's writing and have questions about the pandemic.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It's easy to be blind to the geological layers of history that shape the surfaces of our lives."

If that ain't the truth, I don't know what is. SUCH a great line.

This book was utterly fascinating. I was talking to my husband the other day about a "discussion" I had with my dad about how "great" Reagan was, and how his lived perception of that era was vastly different from the investigative and hindsight version that shows he did massive amounts of harm with his policies. For context, at the time Regan was elected, my dad had just turned 20, was deployed with the Navy, and had next to no experience outside of Iowa beyond the previous couple years in the Navy.

The point in this being: sometimes our lived perceptions of a situation don't mesh with the reality of them. My dad thought that Reagan's policies were doing good in the world, and that he was helping to accomplish that. Decades later, and we can see how the negative effects of those policies overwhelmed people of color, the poor and underserved, while the economic windfalls PROMISED to "trickle down" magically defied gravity against the laws of physics (but not defying the laws of Greedy White Men).

I know that by now you're like "Uhh, this book has nothing to do with Reagan." And you're right - except that it has everything to do with the road he helped set us on. His policies (and those he supported and upheld, even if not started by him) created huge wealth inequalities, created a lack of opportunity in communities that needed it the most, while policing those communities relentlessly in the name of the "war on drugs", stigmatized people who needed and deserved help, while eroding the social safety net, etc etc etc. I could go on - but I'm sure that you get the point.

If you then look at the Covid infection and death stats, there is a ton of overlap. Lower socioeconomic areas, areas with fewer opportunities and more people of color, died at much higher rates than more affluent and white communities. And that is a direct result of funding going to policing over the last several decades instead of resources to create opportunities in those communities. It's a direct result of these areas having few options other than in-person service jobs or factory work, having to use mass transit to commute, etc. It's a direct result of the higher arrest rates for Black and POC people, and the harsher penalties for them, and the out of proportion prison population that results.

I know that a lot of the blame can be put on Trump - but the groundwork was laid long before his incompetent ass was handed the reins.

This book goes into all of this - from decades (centuries really) of socioeconomic policy and opportunity disparities and racist policies to Trump's mishandling of the pandemic in the moment, and the way that the economy was prioritized over everything else (the idea that the elderly should just "take one for the team" so that the younger generations can continue going to bars and restaurants and keep the economy going is fucking depraved and horrible) - and does it excellently. It does jump around a bit and reiterate things that had already been covered previously, but usually from a slightly different perspective with added context, so not REALLY repetitive, but a smidge.

I also didn't feel like there was any real agenda here. I know that any criticism of Trump and mention of race-based issues and inequality is almost always construed as the "liberal agenda", and being a "woke progressive" myself I could understand if you don't trust my assessment on this (if you've even read this far), but I truly felt as though this was an investigation and reporting of the facts available, and not just an attack on the right/Trump/anti-vaxxers/etc.

He presented the situation, the players, the events, the stats, the historical context, relevant details, and that's it. As I listened to this, there were times when I REALLY WANTED to know his position on certain details, but I never got it. He praised Trump's travel ban, admitted that some of the things he said were positive and leader-y, and then in the next line had to qualify much of it with the actual actions Trump took undermined his own statements. Which is true. He also criticized Trump's tossing out the pandemic playbook and cutting funding to critical institutions, and washing his hands of federal responsibility for PPE sourcing and distribution, etc. I think that Wright tried as much as possible to be neutral and fair while laying out the events of 2020.

I really enjoyed this book, as much as anyone can enjoy a nonfiction book about a largely preventable (or at least mitigatable) pandemic that killed millions. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a contextual and nuanced look at this (hopefully) unique year.

[Olive Fellows (abookolive) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Click here to hear my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive!

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wright has written a wide-ranging overview of our COVID pandemic year. He includes the ‘tic-toc’ of cases from Wuhan to the rest of the world, including the United States. He covers the science as to how the virus attacks humans and how prior research of coronaviruses allowed the rapid development of an effective vaccine. Why did the United States respond so poorly to the pandemic when it should have responded the best? Wright discusses the politics of America’s pandemic response at the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. How did mask-wearing become so politicized?

While Wright includes an abundance of statistical information, he does not forget the fact that there is a personal story behind each of the 600,000+ COVID deaths recorded so far. Despite my being an avid reader of COVID-related news, Wright managed to include data and perspectives I was totally unaware of. Highly recommend.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lawrence Wright delivers a comprehensive account of the first year of the pandemic. An excellent account by an excellent journalist/author.

[La Crosse County Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The figure that will haunt America is that the U.S. accounts for about 20 percent of all the COVID fatalities in the world, despite only having 4 percent of the population." --Lawrence Wright, p. 241

Author and journalist Lawrence Wright's latest book, The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID (2021) is a comprehensive account of America's pandemic experience through 2020 and early January 2021. Undoubtedly, it will be one of the many COVID-19 books to follow, but The Plague Year stands out with early COVID histories in its thoroughness.

While Michael Lewis's The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2021) largely focused on those figures working against COVID-19 on the fringes of the economic, health, and political institutions of the country, The Plague Year gives us more of an insider's perspective of the pandemic, that of a government that knew the dangers of the novel coronavirus outbreak early on but was unable or unwilling to act until COVID-19 was beyond containment.



"COVID-19 has deeply affected nearly every part of American society, including politics, race, science, the economy, and the culture at large," Wright observes at the conclusion of The Plague Year (p. 272). As Wright took readers on a journey through 2020, how COVID seemed to reveal the many inequalities present in American society, such as the disproportionate amount of COVID deaths among the communities of people of color, the protests and political rallies that further spread COVID around the country. The overwhelming sense that the virus was tearing everything apart, which seemed to abate when a new president was inaugurated after the 1/6 attack on the Capitol, that new vaccines for COVID would be administered for the larger population beginning in January.

A potential light at the end of the tunnel, or at least a welcomed light within it to help us orient ourselves.



I appreciated Wright's clear-eyed view of 2020, a year which to many may be remembered largely as a blur of anger, anxiety, fear, and death. Likewise, I am thankful for the cautious optimism expressed in the epilogue, that of Americans getting access to effective vaccines even as many parts of the world are ravaged by deadlier and highly contagious variants of COVID-19.

But overwhelmingly, I finished The Plague Year thankful for Wright's calm and clear-eyed presentation of the facts surrounding the first year of the COVID pandemic for historians, scientists, and the lay reader alike. For bearing witness alongside all of us and for history.

At the risk of sounding cliché, the next chapter of the COVID-19 pandemic has yet to be written. Let's make it better than the first.

Until next time, stay safe, get vaccinated, and wash your hands!



-Cora

Find this book and other titles within our catalog.

See also:

Living History: Holmen Eighth Grade Students Respond to 2020 (2021) by Holmen Middle School Eighth Grade Students, published with help by the Holmen Area Historical Society

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2021) by Michael Lewis

The End of October (2020) by Lawrence Wright

[Rennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s no one I could have wanted to narrate the events of 2020/January 2021 more than Lawrence Wright.

My biggest takeaway was the origin of hydroxychloroquine-as-covid-treatment myth. Truly unbelievable. This does leave you with a stomach-churning sense, having taken all these events together in a narrative, of how wretchedly awful we as a people have behaved when we were tested. Wright points out that in elections especially we show who we really are and what matters to us.

It’s a lot to think about. Worth it for the fascinating insights and a few fairly shocking things I didn’t know, although most of it didn’t feel particularly new. His writing is fantastic as ever and he has a way of framing and providing commentary that feels very useful.

The couple of stories he tells of individual Covid deaths were harrowing. The numbers have certainly been mind boggling to the point of evading our sense of reality, but the human faces he puts on them - a passionate nurse from the Bronx and a veteran who was on the Normandy beaches - drive home how massive and devastating this all is.

(It made me so sad to read in his acknowledgements his mention of this probably being near the end of his career!!! No, Lawrence Wright, no! Sorry but we cannot approve your retirement; we need you, end of discussion.)

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so glad this book exists. When I looked to see what was written about the last time we had a pandemic of similar proportions in 1918, it was hard to find anything about it. I wanted to try to understand how people coped and eventually moved beyond the crisis of the pandemic to living again. I was looking for points of hope, something to reach forward to, dreaming of days beyond illness. However, as Lawrence Wright writes, "The war was remembered, chronicled, and memorialized, but recollections of the 1918 pandemic were boxed up and hidden away."

In The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid, Wright has written a well-round and accessible account from many different perspectives. The cast of characters is large and the parts they have played are most diverse.

This book contains so much information that is interesting and it is vital to learn from it and grow forward. I believe I could read it several times over and learn something new each time. From this time of reading, I learned that "Two qualities determined success or failure in dealing with the Covid contagion. One was experience." Places that had experienced SARS, or similar diseases applied that past knowledge to the present pandemic situation.

"The other quality was leadership. Nations and states that did well have been led by strong, compassionate, decisive leaders who speak candidly with their constituents." Here in America "the vast differences in outcomes among the states underscore the absence of a national plan."

In addition to our physical health and mental well-being, Covid has affected the economic health of America on many levels. Reading about the epidemic from the economic perspective was eye opening. I learned that, "Government alone cannot restore the economy to health. Innovation is a primary driver of economic health." Authors of a study on patents for new inventions proved that the majority of patent applications came from wealthy white men. They concluded, "If women, minorities, and children from low-income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income (top 20%) families, the rate of innovation in America would quadruple."

Ending on a positive note, through our experience of Covid "our understanding of viruses, and therefore our ability to treat and counter them, has been transformed." We owe so much to scientists and medical professionals who have dedicated countless hours to researching Covid and caring for people suffering from Covid. Going forward, I hope that we will all receive equitable care and that we will treat each other with kindness.

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for Booktube prize. Review in April
Not sure how many people are ready to read a book about the covid pandemic but this is my 2nd and it was quite hard not to compare the two but they were quite different in their approach. Both written before much is actually clear as far as outcome and the many missteps and who or what was to blame. The previous book I read was: The Premonition by Michael Lewis which presented much more about the early days and how little preparation the public health sector and government had made for an event such as this though it seemed clear that it was a likely eventuality. That was a most interesting and eye opening read on how preparations might have made a difference and the people who tried to understand and find a way to bridge the health system gaps. There was subtle politics but little actual blame in that one.

This book was much more looking at what happened and what much of us saw from political and public health leaders. Admittedly it is hard to comment on the history of the pandemic while still in the middle of the crisis and I felt that was what Lawrence Wright was doing in this book. While I could agree with his facts (Wright is excellent with facts) I could not always agree with his opinion on how they were to blame for all that followed. Lawrence Wright is a wonderful writer at capturing history--his book The Looming Tower concerning 9/11 is a favorite of mine, so I was not disappointed with the writing and did find the audio very well done. I just personally found it a topic/event/history that is too soon to be written and we may never know if or how things might have been different for better or worse.

P.S. This book did not make it through to the next round and was actually in fourth place for the 6 I read but I am very glad to have read it. As a medical person I have my own opinions about this topic and tried to keep a clear mind when hearing others.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

In another conversion in that first week of the new year [January 2020], Dr. Gao [Fu, of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention] started to cry. "I think we're too late," he told Redfield. "We're too late."

"What more, in this time of a national emergency, should these governors be doing?"
"Simple," said Trump. "I want them to be appreciative.

Large sections of this book was published in a January 2021 edition of the New Yorker. Even reading about pandemic news, at a certain point, has grown to be completely exhausting, but this is a serious first draft of history or retrospective of events as they were in 2020.

Wright frames the book around three 'missed opportunities' on containing the pandemic - the failure of the Chinese provincial government to prevent initial spread, the failure of outside governments in banning foreign travel or implementing lockdowns early on, and the third being hesitance in implementing a mask policy.

There is more to it than that, of course. The disproportionate effects of the epidemic on various communities and areas are discussed, as is the disastrous federal response, and the previous presidential administration whipsawing between denial, quack medicine, or wild speculation. But reality is that which, though it is denied, does not go away.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

There will doubtless be many histories written about the COVID-19 pandemic. Some academic and dry and some popular and narrative-driven. The first two of the latter variety are written by excellent authors: Michael Lewis with The Premonition and this book by Lawrence Wright.

Wright writes in a rueful tone about the missed opportunities, lack of national leadership, and disinformation campaigns. He heaps the most scorn on former president Trump, and his behind-the-scenes reporting of the White House and Coronavirus Task Force is fascinating.

I took away a star for meandering chapters and occasionally woke social commentary, but don’t let that deter you from this fine book. We’ll be reading and referring to it for years.

[Brant · Rating 3 out of 5]

At various times during the pandemic, I regret that I didn't keep a daily journal detailing how I felt and what was happening in my home, community, and nation. When my new-born baby grows up and asks what it was like to live during the pandemic and Trump, I may suggest she read this book. It at least describes the major events and developments of 2020. What a crappy year. Oh, and eff Trump.

[Michael Asen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My ONLY complaint is this book could have been twice as long and it left me wanting more. I cannot imagine anyone synthesizing the events of the year 2020 any better than Wright has done here.
This is non-fiction at it's best. It goes back and forth between talking of people we know(Birx, Fauci,Pottinger, Trump) and people we do not but who either played a large role in fighting the pandemic or were deeply affected by it. If you havent read Wright before he is the modern day Halberstam. Hard book toput down.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded to 5. A very engaging audiobook that covers the full Covid story up to June 2021, including previous viral outbreaks, possible origins of Covid-19 (perhaps not the wet market after all), and the poor response in the U.S. compared with many other countries.

Highly recommended!

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful snd well presented, putting 2020 in perspective with a timeline and historical reference.

[Bruce Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the book I thought it would be, though I couldn't, if asked, say exactly what it was I expected it to be. Maybe something that went deeper into the weeds about the history of the pandemic here and around the world. To be entirely honest, though, the book is exactly what the title says it is: an overview of the year in which Covid erupted into the world and visited the US.

As I said, Wright doesn't go into the weeds, but what he sacrifices in depth he more than offsets by breadth. Always a thorough researcher and engaging reporter, Wright takes the reader from Covid's very beginnings in China through to the events of January 6, 2021. In gracious and accessible language, he describes how the outbreak began (so far as is known) and how China played it down and blocked repeated international efforts to identify the genetic structure of the virus. How the information first came to the attention of American scientists and policy makers. What steps -- and missteps -- were taken by the American political and medical establishments. How the death toll grew and grew, and how politicians and citizens responded. (Spoiler alert: It wasn't our finest hour.) The disproportionate impacts the virus had on low income workers and people of color. And more. Much much more. For example, he offers several brief histories of previous pandemics, such as bubonic plague, Spanish flu (1918), HIV/AIDS, and polio (which Wright himself contracted as a child), and how emergent diseases like Swine Flu, MERS, and Ebola were met by public health officials and medical researchers.

As one would expect, the book introduces us to a lot of people. Some were on our TV screens every day; others were chosen because their stories are representative of how lives were altered, how people responded to loss and uncertainty. Wright is appropriately critical of the Trump Administration's response to the virus, but he does so calmly: the book is not polemical, and to be sure, Trump's inane comments about the virus are well-known and need no elaboration. But neither is it reticent in calling out incompetence and how public safety was sacrificed in favor of political expedience, at both the federal and state level. (Looking at you, Abbott! Wright lives in Texas.) Wright is judicious and balanced in his coverage of individuals like Deborah Birx and others who drew widespread opprobrium. I thought him quite smart in his decisions about which voices to give prominence to: medical researchers like John Brooks, Greg Armstrong, Barney Graham, and Jason McLellan (among others), and on the political side, Matthew Pottinger (US Deputy National Security Advisor during part of the Trump years -- he comes off quite well in the book for his foresight and integrity -- whose wife, Yen, is a virologist, and whose brother Paul is an infectious disease physician). And Gianna Pomata, a medical historian whose experiences at the height of the Covid outbreak in Italy add depth.

I found the book even-handed and extremely readable. I'm not a big science reader (alas), but I had no difficulty at all following Wright's discussions of the science. At the other "end," his periodic interjections of his own experiences, rather than distracting from the narrative flow, provide interesting and useful insight and context.

There's a lot of hair-raising stuff in these pages (well, they'd be hair-raising if I still had hair but I don't, so my wording is meant to be metaphorical). There's this, for example: "I set about to educate myself on viruses and I was immediately astonished by the fact that science still knew so little about them. Scientists were shocked to learn that there were viruses in sea water; a single liter can contain about 100 billion of them... Ninety percent of which were unknown. A recent (2018) attempt to do a "rough census" of viruses in the air determined that "800 million viruses a day were raining down on every square meter of the earth's surface." And then there's the stuff lying in wait in bat caves and the like. Happily, Wright balances these numbers with a critically important fact: viruses were absolutely critical in guiding human evolution, including the parts of us that control memory formation, our immune system, and cognitive development.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quintessential summary of the first year of Covid-19 in America. Wright is able to synthesize elements of history, economics, science, sociology, medical policy and politics to flesh out his episodic narrative of different aspects of the pandemic.

[Shain Verow · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly clear eyed amounting of the recent history related to the American experience with the Covid-19 pandemic. The author has done a great job with untangling the very messy reality of the pandemic, making coherent narratives out of what was anything but to those living through the events.

Sorting out the public statements from the private activation of the people in public office at the time has some rather enlightening information. The microbiology and genetics information in here is quite accurate and well explained. Probably the best aspect of this book is the sense of perspective, always keeping the grand sweeping internationally significant events in the scope of personal experience, which prevents the loss of the tragedy in every part of this, while still maintaining the historical context of the pandemic.

In the end, it’s hardly an apolitical book, but only because it is impossible to look closely at the events without having strong feelings about how certain individuals chose to respond to them. Maybe in a hundred years there will be enough emotional distance from the evidence of callous indifference to mass death of innocent people, but I think the author is honest to not pretend to be immune to such things.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This history is so fresh that I wonder if I should have waited to read it.

[Jacqueline Masumian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important book, one that is worth owning. Have it on your shelf as a ready reference in case your memories of that horrendous year when everything went haywire begin to fade. It will act as a reminder of what we went through in 2020 with the explosion of Covid-19, the incompetent handling of the pandemic by the Trump administration, an economic disaster like none we'd ever seen, and the racial strife that plagued our country, exposing even more racial divide than we had known before.

The book provides a detailed behind-the-scenes view of what was happening in the White House while Covid was killing thousands of people daily. The faulty tests, the lack of masks and PPE, the denials and defiance by the president, the dreadful performance of the Coronavirus Task Force, are all described in vivid detail. There were scientists and researchers throwing out red flags about the severity of the disease's spread, but nobody in the administration seemed willing to listen. The author also describes the not-so-well-known efforts of scientists like Deborah Birx, who traveled around the country trying to persuade governors about the seriousness of the threat.

Lawrence Wright also delves into the rampant racism that was unmasked that year and how the inequity of medical care for minorities became all too evident. He explores the disastrous blow the economy took with millions of people suddenly out of work. The repercussions of those problems are still being felt today, as we attempt to approach some sense of normalcy.

The book is marred somewhat by a lack of organization in spots, and the author has a tendency to go off on tangents that seem irrelevant, but the book itself is very relevant to how we proceed as a society, especially in the face of any future disaster. What lessons have we learned, if any?

[Jan Peregrine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lawrence Wright's ninth bestselling book The Plague Year: America in the Tim of Covid is one he often cried over while he researched and wrote it. With over one hundred interviews conducted over the phone or Zoom of leading scientists, politicians, and COVID-19 survivors, he asked many difficult questions with elusive answers that arose last year with the sneak attack of a novel coronavrus.

He takes us into the background of the ensuing, worldwide catastrophe nobody was expecting., As he points out, it seemed likely that we were living beyond the time when pandemics could happen.

We're still not certain of who Patient Zero was.

Chinese authorities have been uncooperative from the beginning when people starting dying around Wuhan, a city that has a prior history with a less deadly coronavirus shortly after 9/11. There is much speculation over how COVID-19 got its legs, even conspiracy theories. Wright investigates by listening to what Chinese and other scientists say is fact and what is possible. Ultimately, it could not be manufactured in a Wuhan lab, although a similar virus could've escaped that lab and mutated.

Although the Chinese will not admit that's a possibility. Their denial of a health crisis allowed the virus to wreak havoc all over the world as people in China traveled and spread it. Peoples' continued hesitation or refusal to get vaccinated today allows the virus to keep mutating and spreading.

Please realize the great difficulty the world was confronted with when they had no idea that infected often don't show symptoms. It's an asymptomatic disease spread through talking loudly, singing, and breathing hard around others who are also unmasked or poorly masked. You could be coughed on or shake hands with someone infected who covered their mouths.

But the great confusion over the nature of the mutating virus does not excuse the gross incompetence of the American federal government under the Trump administration.

Wright notes that Trump acted like a leader in the pandemic's early days. My thought is that he read from a teleprompter, but perhaps he wasn't completely against science then. Wright explains that Trump has always been a germophobe and so the virus must've terrified him. Then when the CDC recommended that people wear masks outside their homes, Trump mocked the idea. He wouldn't wear one. It's just a recommendation, he pointed out. Wright says that's when Trump became a saboteur.

I don't have the stomach to tell you all the ways Trump failed to control COVID-19. He lay the responsibility on his bewildered governors for finding and competing for personal protective equipment , only for them to be outbid by FEMA! He encouraged ignoring them, committing violence on them.

At the beginning of 2020 the US economy seemed to be booming. It soon crashed.

At the end of 2020 twenty percent of COVID-19 deaths came from the US that only has four percent of the world's population. I wonder what the percentage is today.

Wright follows the very rocky journey of a scientist through his four years of the Trump White House. Though a Republican, when he met Trump in his opulent hotel he couldn't believe such a stupid would be his president He often wanted to quit, but knew the country desperately needed him. His last day was the horrifying day of the Capitol riots and deaths.
America is mot healthy. It's angry and very divided. It was that way before the current pandemic, even if many of us didn't want to recognize that and address it. COVID-19, as Wright reflects, has brought out our underlying illness and anger, especially anger that erupted with George Floyd's murder.

One good thing that has happened is our scientific preparation against lurking deadly viruses. All that knowledge won't be enough to defeat COVID-19, though.

We all need to get fully vaccinated and follow the CDC recommendations.

Only by not being a superspreader like Trump and infecting or killing dozens of vulnerable people, will we be acting like patriots and ethical (pro-life) as well. Wright discusses how similar the flu epidemic of 1918-1919 was to today's pandemic. History is sadly repeating itself...so far.

It didn't have to be this way, do you think?

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

If it's too early for a post-mortem on the COVID-19 pandemic, America's publishers haven't gotten the memo. Amazon lists 642 titles in response to the query "books about the COVID-19 pandemic." The pandemic still rages on, filling hospitals in heavily impacted states and killing the unvaccinated in disturbing numbers. Not to mention the huge numbers of people falling ill and dying in other countries.

Still, at least two leading nonfiction authors have seen fit to render judgment on the American response to the disease. Michael Lewis' The Premonition: A Pandemic Story artfully views the pandemic from within the public health community. And now Lawrence Wright examines the events of the past year and a half from a panoramic perspective in The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID.

Premature or not, both books go a long way toward helping us understand what went so very wrong. They provide what is surely the most accurate perspective on the pandemic that's within reach today.

The tragic absence of leadership

Is there a single, overarching reason for the debacle? Wright seems to suggest that it may be the abdication of leadership by the Trump Administration. "It was a national problem," he writes, "but there would be no national plan. The pandemic was broken into fifty separate epidemics and dumped into the reluctant embrace of the surprised and unprepared governors."

Why have so many died in the USA?

Wright's account casts light on several aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic that weren't apparent at the time. Working with the limited hindsight of a single year - and with the pandemic still raging around the world - he identifies three significant missteps that account for the tragic and unnecessary number of deaths in the United States.

The Chinese coverup

The first of those missteps was China's refusal to admit scientists from the CDC and WHO to interview Chinese doctors on the front line in Wuhan and study their findings. Wright characterizes it as an illustration of "the enduring legacy of Maoism." Surely, this must be where any perspective on the pandemic must begin. Had the outside world gained entry to Wuhan, the world would have known weeks or months earlier that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is both highly contagious and transmissible through the air. Knowing these facts, the US public health community would have acted more decisively and much sooner.

However, some researchers have asserted that China's guilt may lie even deeper. Wright includes a scary account of the science behind the claim that the virus accidentally escaped in 2019 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Scientists at the lab were studying coronaviruses and may have developed a potentially contagious variant in order to study how to counteract it. This claim is controversial. However, the circumstances Wright relates are suspicious. He notes that lethal viruses (including Ebola) have escaped from virtually every other highly secure biolab in the world, including those of the CDC and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

The CDC "testing fiasco"

"The testing fiasco marked the second failed opportunity." Wright's characterization of the problem is right on target, because the CDC fumbled the task of developing a test for COVID in multiple ways. It refused to permit local health facilities throughout the country, many of them experienced in developing tests on their own, to do so. The CDC declined to adopt a proven test developed in Germany. Its own test proved to yield a huge number of false positives, and it took several crucial weeks to correct the problem. But it distributed its own, ultimately workable test, to only a handful of hospitals, without making arrangements for the test's widespread manufacture. That caused additional weeks of delay.

The White House move against masks

The third of the "failed opportunities" Wright points to is the resistance to the use of masks. Wright lays much of the blame for the pandemic's high death toll (as so many others have done) inside the White House. He relates in detail the raging debates within the menagerie of ideological zealots, misfits, and sycophants who dominated the Trump Administration. But there was little debate about using masks, since the President himself refused to wear one and insisted that those around him take them off. ("Immune to irony, he even toured a mask-making factory in Arizona without a mask.") However, the White House isn't the sole culprit.

"Masks have been a part of public health for over a century," Wright observes, "but until April [2020], the WHO and other health agencies actively discouraged their use among healthy people, speculating that masks might cause people to take risks, and if worn incorrectly could put them at greater risk." But the doctors changed course in the spring, and only the President and his staff, supported by Right-Wing media and Republican officials throughout the country, continued to argue against using masks.

Collectively, these three factors dictated that huge numbers of Americans would die. Now, of course, there is a fourth factor that prevents public health officials from containing the pandemic: the anti-vaccine movement promoted by the Republican Party. As I write, we are already seeing elevated levels of hospitalization and death as a result. And hospital systems in Red States such as Florida are reeling as a result of the Delta variant of the virus.

If it's premature to gain perspective on the pandemic in mid-2021, Lawrence Wright's portrayal must rank with the best that can be obtained today.

About the author

Lawrence Wright (1947-) has been on the staff of the New Yorker since 1992. His contributions have included some of the magazine's most widely cited articles, and he has won numerous awards for his writing. The Plague Year is his eleventh nonfiction book. He has also written two novels and at least one play, which premiered at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Wright is best known for his study of Al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, and for his exposé of Scientology, Going Clear. He lives in Austin, Texas.

[Kenneth Chanko · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one does this sort of thing better than Lawrence Wright. In "The Plague Year," Wright does for the pandemic -- as far as our country's experience -- what he did for 9/11 in his masterwork, "The Looming Tower." Sure, you think you know everything about SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 and how it came to our country and how scientists came up with the vaccines and how our country's leaders dealt with it and how it impacted the lives of ordinary folks, etc. -- because you lived through it so recently. Well, think again. Wright's compelling book goes wide and deep. It will undoubtedly be the definitive book on the pandemic for years to come. Every American should read it.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I heard a lot about this book around when it came out in June 2021 - when people were getting vaccinated and the delta variant wasn't so pervasive. It felt like we could start "looking back" on COVID19 in the United States - maybe, or in some parts of it. Finishing reading the book in September 2021 was pretty depressing, as breakthrough infections are noted in the vaccinated and delta has become more prevalent. I wonder if the book should be retitled The Plague YearS.

So, a lot of my disappointment is more with the COVID19 response itself rather than the book. But the book focuses so much on politics (which is not inappropriate) that it felt too soon and too depressing to me.

[Karen Ng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, I haven’t read anything so entertaining on infectious diseases and microorganisms, but this book is much more than facts. It recorded a very important part of history as well- from the making of CDC, Chinese history, development of the Covid vaccine, all the way to the ex White House administration(45). I highly recommend it.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Nothing new here, but Lawrence Wright provides a very well-organized account of 2020 - the pandemic and its origins and the responses, George Floyd, election, January 6, etc. I found it interesting to look back on events with a fresh perspective. This would be a great book to give someone in the future who did not live through, or remember, this past year.