Taking a page from history

Books that teach us how viruses spread may help us better understand COVID-19

The coronavirus outbreak that started in Wuhan is shocking but not surprising. China has long been pinpointed as a crucible for the emergence of new viruses, particularly those capable of spilling over from their animal hosts to humans.

So-called zoonotic infections can be particularly dangerous because we have no prior immunity. A circulating virus is also constantly mutating. A chance mutation may make a virus more, or less, transmissible from person to person. The current disease caused by the virus, which has been officially named COVID-19, has killed more people than SARS (most COVID-19 victims, it should be said, also suffered from other health conditions). It is too early to tell whether we face a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu, thought to have killed between 50 million and 100 million — but not too late to get up to speed on a clear and present danger.

These books can help us understand the spread of viruses and the threat of a global pandemic:

Spillover

David Quammen

W.W. Norton

The go-to book from 2012 if you want the lowdown on zoonotic diseases, including Ebola and lesser-known nasties like Nipah. Quammen draws on his travels as a science writer to show how ecological changes and human behaviour can combine to unleash a zoonotic virus more destructive than any engineered bioweapon.

Getting to Zero

Sinead Walsh and Oliver Johnson

Zed Books

This is a harrowing memoir, published in 2018, from two people on the front line of the devastating 2014 Ebola outbreak in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Johnson, a doctor, and Walsh, then the Irish ambassador to Sierra Leone, recount how distant decision-making, poor local leadership and a fragile health system led to a humanitarian tragedy.

The Coming Plague

Laurie Garrett

Virago Press

Written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has long argued that emerging diseases should be a major foreign policy issue. This 1994 classic, which among other things forecasts how climate change and refugee migration are changing the disease landscape, now reads like hindsight.

Pale Rider

Laura Spinney

Publicaffairs

Every emerging pathogen, including COVID-19, is inevitably measured against the 1918 Spanish flu. This 2017 work delves into the history, geography, virology and psychology of this 20th-century disaster, offering an unsparing portrait of a menace that killed more people than the First World War.

How to Survive a Plague

David France

Vintage

The epic inside story, published in 2016, of how patient activism transformed the perception of HIV-AIDS as an issue rooted in both public health and politics. With China censoring public dissent around the outbreak, perhaps one day there will be a similarly sweeping firsthand account of the politics of COVID-19.

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