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The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid review – a devastating analysis

Lawrence Wright’s deep research reveals the oversights and errors that fatally hampered the US reponse to Covid

It has become an embarrassingly well known fact that in the 2019 Global Health Security Index, the US was ranked No 1 in the world for preparedness for a pandemic (the UK, almost as embarrassingly, was No 2). Exactly how the US became the worst affected country in the world – more than 590,000 Americans have so far died from Covid – is now the subject of much finger-pointing debate.

Recently, Michael Lewis’s Premonition looked at a group of people in public health in the US who warned of what was coming but were ignored. Lawrence Wright, who is a master of knitting together complex narratives, takes a much broader view of the proceedings in The Plague Year.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3yNyOdn
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