The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19
MARK HONIGSBAUM
(W.H. ALLEN, 384 PP, £9.99)
Tablet bookshop price £8.99 • Tel 020 7799 4064
“The coronavirus is not to be sneezed at,” I wrote in The Daily Telegraph in the very early days of Covid-19; still, the experts’ predictions of several million cases in Britain alone “are likely, on past form, to be a tad alarmist”. The precedent of the previous Sars (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) pandemic in 2003, also caused by the coronavirus and originating in China in similar circumstances, was moderately reassuring: it mustered just over 8,000 cases with 774 fatalities. So this new outbreak, I anticipated, “though serious is likely to be manageable”: scarcely an adequate description of the current global social and economic catastrophe that so far has cost the lives of around 425,000 people.
With hindsight, two main factors account for why the impact of the Sars-CoV-2 virus (as it is designated) should have proved to be so vastly more devastating. First, as Mark Honigsbaum observes in The Pandemic Century, in the intervening 17 years China has boomed, the population of Wuhan (where the virus was first identified) mushrooming to 11 million, its airport an international hub with non-stop flights to 100 destinations around the world. By the time President Xi Jinping belatedly imposed lockdown on 17 January – three weeks after the first reported cases – five million people, many incubating the virus, had passed through the city, spreading it far and wide.