Niall Ferguson’s Doom and Michael Lewis’s The Premonition – two chronicles of the pandemic likely to dominate bestseller lists for some time – deal with such tragedy in spades. In this sense, Covid-19 has the makings of a classical tragedy: not mere misfortune but a sequence of unheeded prophecies, unknowing collusion with calamity and disorientation when required to act. Yet come January 2020, authorities worldwide were slow, indecisive, and ill-prepared. SARS, MERS, Ebola, and swine flu were further clues. Science journalists wrote books with titles such as The Coming Plague (Laurie Garrett) and Spillover (David Quammen), whose conclusions were amplified by TED-talking billionaires. For decades, virologists foresaw the coincidence of urbanisation, human proximity with animals, climate change, and globalisation as ideal conditions for spreading deadly pathogens. One of the disconcerting aspects of this pandemic is that there was no shortage of warnings.
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