Reading During the Time of COVID

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry

 I have to say that my reading during the past few months has followed a certain theme.

So this most recent read shouldn't be a surprise.  What did surprise me, almost continually as I read this book, is how much the current COVID pandemic parallels a pandemic that raged around the world just over 100 years ago.

It's about the flu pandemic of 1917-18 (although it lasted several years after 1918), and although I understood that it was about that particular flu pandemic, most of time I had this feeling that the book was really about our current global outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19. Far too many times I found myself thinking that not much has changed, everything from a lack of preparedness, denial of what was happening, refusal to take simple public health precautions, lack of leadership, and so on....

A brief review quoted from GoodReads:

"At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing danger of the avian flu, The Great Influenza is ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. John M. Barry has written a new afterword for this edition that brings us up to speed on the terrible threat of the avian flu and suggest ways in which we might head off another flu pandemic."

If you want to learn more about viruses, the modernization of the American medical system (including the formation of Johns Hopkins), and how this particular virus operated, this is a must read.

Highly recommended.