Pandemics: The lessons we never learn

The collective wisdom of past plagues reveals much about the state of the world: Its fault lines, its interconnectedness, its vulnerabilities.

- NEHA BHATT

But as veteran journalist and former New York Times science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. observes in The Wisdom of Plagues, while societies today are well-armed to remain on guard against military threats, aided by elaborate detection mechanisms, our disease-alert systems remain far less sophisticated with "inherent flaws." "In practice, the WHO's systems have not worked very well. I can't think of a single serious outbreak I learned of first from them," he writes.

When Mr. McNeil first saw a notice on a disease-alert service on December 31, 2019, about unexplained pneumonia cases linked to a seafood market in Wuhan, he thought it sounded suspiciously like the way SARS began. At first distracted by other deadlines, McNeil writes he quickly sensed a public health crisis looming well before political leaders believed it, and recounts his furious email exchanges with colleagues and editors to warn them of what may lie ahead. Yet through his career, covering public health, epidemics and infectious disease across 60 countries, he has often wrestled with the question of whether he was too alarmist, or not alarmist enough.