Preventable

By Devi Sridhar Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

In early 2020 a virus originating in China spread across the world and affected the lives of the 7.8 billion people living on earth. Different countries took drastically different approaches to managing a challenge unprecedented in the era of globalization. What became clear was the critical importance of the role of individuals within or advising governments in shaping each country’s specific response. Scientific communities also raced to find solutions to save humanity, with science being seen as the only true exit strategy from the pandemic. For years there had been warnings from the scientific community that the greatest threat to humanity would be a pandemic of an acute respiratory pathogen. These warnings were largely ignored.

It would be hard to overstate the significance that will be attributed to the 2020 crisis by history – on a par with the 1918 flu pandemic as a once-in-a-century event that touched every person’s life on this planet. As the science writer Ed Yong said, ‘The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined by time and space. The SARSCOV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world.’ The human race had never before been so interconnected, as people faced a virus that just kept on spreading.

If aliens wanted to run an experiment on earth to understand human behaviour, the COVID-19 pandemic would be the ultimate test and revelation. In a crisis, do humans turn on each other or come together? Where are the fracture lines of society? SARS-COV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, causes absolutely no symptoms in some people and leads to deadly disease in others. It pits the healthy against those with underlying health issues, the young against the old, and essential health care workers against those who want their normal services and lives back. Infectious diseases bind us together: a lesson developing countries that face multiple outbreaks a year know well, and one that richer countries like Britain and the US painfully learnt. What would aliens have thought after eighteen months observing our world?

About the author

Devi Sridhar is Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. She has served as a policy advisor for the WHO, UNICEF, UNESCO and the Scottish, UK and German governments. Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World & How to Stop the Next One is published by Viking, price £20