Books & Covid-19
Some people I know read copious amounts of fiction while in the various lockdowns we've endured since March 2020. Others I know - not so much. Me? I found it very hard to get into anything fictional. The first lockdown was the worst. I did manage to read a couple of novels later in the year, but in that first, long, lockdown all I could do was read coronavirus updates in the New Scientist, listen to science podcasts, watch documentaries about Covid-19, read books about pandemics, and generally follow the ins and outs of Covid-19.
To stay sane, I also kept playing the trumpet. Though all communal music-making stopped, I kept playing by giving myself some challenges for motivation - but this article is not about me and my trumpet. It's about books.
So, what, you may ask, is on my bookshelves (real and virtual) now that wasn't there before Covid struck? Lots of books about pandemics, covid, and (sorry, it can't be helped) a book about Trump's handling of it in the States. I'm sure others about that will follow - or already be out that I've not picked up on yet - but, at the time of writing, I only have this one (The Plague Year, America in the time of Covid by Lawrence Wright). I may write a separate post about all the books I read after Trump's election, but I'll resist the urge to do that here.
I think my covid book collection can be broken down into three broad categories. First, there are books about other pandemics - particularly the Black Death and the 1918 'flu pandemic. Second, there are the books about the UK's response: some were produced relatively early in the pandemic have a certain rawness. The later arrivals have, I feel, a cooler, more analytic feel. But, no doubt, there will be more to come as the pandemic eventually fades, and we can look back with some distance at the strange times we've all been through. I have two very recently published books by key players - Spike and Vaxxers - sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. The third category contains, perhaps, the most challenging books of them all to read: these are the first-hand accounts of health workers and, in one case, a patient. Some of the stories are heartrendingly sad: all the more so as the author's voice is in your head, not mediated through a TV screen.
Category 1: Other pandemics
I think the first book I read after the covid outbreak came to the attention of the general public (about Jan/Feb 2020) was Pale Rider by Laura Spinney. A fantastically detailed book on the 1918 ‘flu pandemic, which is probably, the worst pandemic in history with an estimated death toll of 50-100 million people. The Black Death may have killed a larger proportion of the population, but the “Spanish flu” had the higher, absolute death toll. This was also the first pandemic where travel played a crucial part in the spread of the virus: the movement of troops from Kansas (where, in fact, the ‘flu virus was first transmitted to a soldier) in the US to Europe towards the end of the First World War was the critical event. The 1918 pandemic only has the name “Spanish Flu” because Spain was the first country to accept, and make public, that they had a problem whereas, in reality, it had started in the US and, most likely, on a pig farm.
John Hatcher’s book, The Black Death: The Intimate Story of a Village in Crisis (1345-1350), has an unusual structure in that it is half history and half novel. The progress of the disease is told chronologically from the viewpoint of a single English village: Walsham-le-Willow in rural Suffolk. Each chapter begins with the historical context drawn from existing documentation. Then, the rest of the chapter is a fictionalised account of events in the village as seen by their (fictional) priest Master John. This is a fantastic introduction to this dark period rooted in historical facts brought to life in a most compelling and readable way. Both the Black Death and Spanish Flu were, of course, before any effective treatments were available and little was understood about disease. The villagers in Suffolk relied on God to save them (or considered it a punishment for some unknown sins). For the 20th Century population, even the concept of a virus was unknown. Thankfully, in the 21st Century, we have more advanced science enabling us to develop vaccines quickly.
Of course, one of the most famous pestilence stories is A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. The version I have is in a Kindle download (Pandemics, Plagues and Pestilences) which includes a few, shorter references to other plagues. Defoe’s book about the London Plague (1665) is not a contemporary account - it was published in 1722 - and what the account is actually based on is open to some debate as few other sources exist. Defoe did have an uncle, Henry Foe, to which the initials “HF” and the end of the manuscript may refer. But, be that as it may, the account paints a striking picture of life in London during the year: not a pleasant one.
The final book in the category is The Pandemic Century by Mark Honigsbaum. My copy is a paperback with very small print! - but fascinating and very readable. It covers all the major pandemics (and near misses) from the 1918 flu through Legionnaires, AIDS, SARS, Ebola, and Zika. Originally published in 2019. just before Covid-19, the latest edition has an extra chapter on Disease X and Covid-19. What is striking about the book is how often it is the preconceived ideas of what a potential outbreak will look like by those with influence that leads to a pandemic spreading farther than it need have done.
I suppose science has to make some assumptions in order to model or predict possible outcomes, and these must be based on what has gone before. But this must be counterbalanced by an open-mindedness to new data and research: too often, it seems, those wielding the most influence are wedded to particular frames of reference and are unwilling, or unable, to modify them. In the case of Covid-19, the battle seems to have been about whether virus transmission was mainly by touch or airborne.
Category 2: Covid-19
The first of the books in this category is The Covid-19 Catastrophe, by Richard Horton. A short book, only 133 pages, it was the first of the books to be published (in June 2020) about the pandemic and does not pull its punches. There are plenty of targets of his ire - from Trump’s defunding of the WHO to Johnson’s reluctance to instigate a lockdown and the decade long underfunding of the NHS and the wider public health system. Being written so early into the pandemic - more than twelve months later, we are still living covid-19 restrictions, and global rates are still extremely high - may date this account, but there is no denying the anger within.
The next out of the blocks was Deborah MacKenzie’s Covid-19, The Pandemic that never should have happened (July 2020). MacKenzie, a journalist that has been reporting on pandemics and emerging diseases for thirty years, has put together a gripping analysis of the situation as it was then. As with “The Pandemic Century”, she takes a look at the recent pandemics and details the lessons we should have learned from them but didn’t. Written with journalistic panache, it is a gripping and authoritative read. As a near contemporaneous account of the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it details the obvious failures of government preparedness - despite prior warning - and public health underfunding will be relevant for years to come.
In Blinded by Corona, Professor John Ashton draws on his lifelong experience in public health to detail a scathing summary of the government’s response to Covid-19 and its failure to follow tried and tested public health response methods in favour of untried methodologies. Published a bit later than the two previous books (October 2020), it contrasts the UK government’s creation of, for example, a monolithic test and trace system and lack of information gathering at the start of the pandemic with his work for the government in Bahrain. How their outcome compares with the UK’s at the end of the pandemic is, of course, yet to be decided. Any comparison will not be straightforward as the countries are so different - Bahrain’s population is only 1.6m, for example - but it is clear now that our government made serious mistakes at the start of the pandemic and did not learn from them as it progressed.
There are two books I’ve included in the category, although they are not specifically about Covid-19, but are about the mathematics of pandemics. I read them both during the first lockdown in March/April 2020, but they must have been written in the months leading up to the pandemic. The first - The Maths of Life and Deaths by Kit Yates - a more general look at how to read and understand the mathematical concepts that we have all become familiar with: exponential growth, sensitivity, specificity, the S-I-R model, and, of course, the “R” number. As well as explaining these terms, he also gives examples of various fallacies and common mathematical mistakes. The Prosecutor’s Fallacy, for instance, was critical in the Sally Clark case where she was convicted of causing the death of her children until finally being acquitted on appeal. An essential read for all armchair epidemiologists.
The second book was published just as the pandemic hit in March 2020. The Rules of Contagion, Why Things Spread and Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski is a very detailed explanation of the life cycle of pandemics. Taking examples from disease control, finance, internet memes, scientific concepts, etc. he examines the way contagion works and how it can be modelled mathematically. Again, like Kit Yates’s book, this should be required reading for all those people who pontificate on how Covid-19 will play out. We have already seen how multiple waves have spread over the country, how some commentators (some of which were respected scientists) have been shown to be wrong. Facts change. Models’ predictions will change with the changing facts. But these mathematical rules, and the models built with them, provide the best way to prepare for both the best and worst outcomes and avoid unnecessary deaths.
No list of books about Covid-19 would be complete without some reference to the US, and its response. In Lawrence Write’s The Plague Year, America in the time of Covid the whole chaotic, optimistic, blasé, dysfunctional regime that as the Trump White House is documented. Wright starts at the beginning of the pandemic in China, where their lack of openness undoubtedly made matters worse than they need to have been. We will never know how much pain and suffering (both physical and economic) could have been avoided but that, together with mistakes by the WHO and a dismissive White House, clearly made matters worse. For a country ranked No 1 in the Global Health Index for pandemic preparedness to be so unprepared is embarrassing. But as the UK was No 2, and had an equally dysfunctional government, there is more than enough embarrassment to go around.
The last book in this category is The Premonition by Michael Lewis. Lewis is a well-known journalist and author: two previous books (Moneyball and The Big Short) have been made into major films. In this book, he follows the story of a group of medics and scientists who very quickly saw the pandemic potential of the Wuhan outbreak and worked to get the Trump White House to take it seriously. Trump himself is a minor figure in this story, but his shadow looms over the chaos in the WH and dysfunctional federal response. In addition, the fragmented health system and the state-level government is also part of the problem this group had to battle against. It reads like a novel and does not bode well for future pandemics unless real change is made. At the time of writing (August 2021), these issues are still as evident as the new Biden administration battles again the state, senate, and Delta variant, which is on the rise in the southern states.
Category 3: The witnesses
The three books in this category are the hardest and most emotional to read. Dr Dominic Pimenta'sDuty of Care is a powerful and disturbing account of the pandemic's beginning and the inadequate government response. It is full of the raw emotion of the early days when he could see what was happening in Italy, could see it coming to the UK, yet there were no obvious preparations being made, and his warnings were being ignored. From this distance - it is now some 18 months since the start of the pandemic - it gets harder to recall the sense of impending disaster and the utter failure of government. This is what we need to remember, and this book can help us do that.
Even more powerful, I'm my opinion, is Dr Rachel Clarke'sBreathtaking, Inside the NHS in a time of pandemic. Such a powerful book, written at the same time as she worked in an NHS hospital's emergency department. She details the trauma of working in this environment when PPE was in short supply, ICUs were filling up, patients were dying without their loved ones, young doctors and nurses were being thrown into this war zone. It is a tough book to read, but one that should stand testimony to the care and compassion of all those in the NHS who did, and still are, battling against Covid-19.
The final word must go to Michael Rosen'sMany Different Kinds of Love. Beautifully written, it is a sad, harrowing, uplifting love letter to the NHS and the doctors and nurses who cared for him while in intensive care for eight weeks. Perhaps the first book to tell the story of Covid-19 from the patient's point of view, it couldn't have come from a better pen.
Bibliography
Category 1: Other pandemics
Pandemics, Plagues and Pestilences. Reading Girl, 2020. Kindle.
Hatcher, John. The Black Death: The Intimate Story of a Village in Crisis, 1345-1350. Phoenix, 2008.
Honigsbaum, Mark. The Pandemic Century, A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19. Penguin, 2019.
Spinney, Laura. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world. Vintager Penguin Book, 2018.
Category 2: Covid-19
Ashton, John. Blinded by Corona, How the Pandemic Ruined Britain’s Health and Wealth. Gibson Square, 2020.
Farrar, Jeremy and Anjana Ahuja. Spike: The Virus vs. The People - the Inside Story. Profile Books, 2021.
Gilbert, Professor Sarah and Dr Catherine Green. Vaxxers, The inside story of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. Hodder and Stoughton, 2021.
Horton, Richard. The Covid-19 Catastrophe, What’s gone wrong and how to stop it happening again. Polity Press, 2020.
Kucharski, Adam. The Rules of Contagion, Why Things Spread and Why They Stop. Profile Books, 2021.
Lewis, Michael. The Premonition, A Pandemic Story. Allen Lane, 2021.
MacKenzie, Debora. Covid-19, The Pandemic that never should have happened, and how to stop the next one. The Bridge Street Press, 2021.
Wright, Lawrence. The Plague Year, America in the time of Covid. Allen Lane, 2021.
Yates, Kit. The Maths of Life and Death. Quercus Editions. 2019.
Category 3: The witnesses
Clarke, Dr Rachel. Breathtaking, Inside the NHS in a time of pandemic. Little, Brown, 2021.
Pimenta, Dr Dominic. Duty of Care. Welbeck, 2020.
Rosen, Michael. Many Different Kinds of Love, A story of Life and Death in the NHS. Ebury Press, 2021.