Book in the news… what we should have done in the pandemic
Preventable
How a Pandemic Changed the World & How to Stop the Next One
Devi Sridhar
Viking, £20
In the summer of 2018, 18 months before the first public reports of what would become known as Covid-19, Devi Sridhar warned about a “pandemic looming on the horizon”, says Oliver Barnes in the Financial Times. She argued that the “biggest threat” was a Chinese farmer getting infected with a novel pathogen from an animal before boarding a plane bound for Britain. In this book, Sridhar takes readers on a “rapid world tour” to help us understand why countless Western nations with plentiful capacity, especially the UK and the US, “failed the pandemic test in 2020”, while “less obvious candidates rose to the challenge”.
Her basic argument is that public-health officials and policymakers should have paid more attention to what other countries were doing, says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. She is particularly positive about South Korea, “which embraced social distancing and masks but sought to keep schools open and avoid full lockdown” in favour of a “formidable (if very invasive) test-and-trace system”. There was also a lot to be learned from the developing world, which was ignored because British experts, she writes, were “so used to telling poorer countries how to do global health that they completely forgot humility and to listen to what experts in those poorer countries were saying or doing”.
For some readers, Sridhar’s status as “a scattergun-tweeting, otter-loving, fitnessfanatic adviser to the Scottish government”, and her past support for the zero-Covid strategy of total elimination, will be enough to put readers off, says Tom Whipple in The Times. That is a pity because her arguments are more nuanced than you might expect, and have changed over the past two years. Her look into what other countries did, and her reminder that some did far better over the past two years, makes a worthwhile contribution to a debate that has become “oddly parochial”. This is far from the “definitive” account, but it will help the process of “slowly piecing together a jigsaw” of what we should have done.