The Premonition: A Tale of Survival During a Global Pandemic

Chris Ochs: A lot of stuff went right. And a LOT of stuff went wrong.

Pride Cometh Before The Fall, and Michael Lewis exposes a whole bunch of it!

Per usual, great job.

United States on Dec 18, 2023

John Lavik: I couldn't put the book down, but part of me wishes I'd never read it because it shows how bleak our future really is.

United States on Dec 07, 2023

Joe Btfsplk 47: The US Governemt employs some very intelligent, creative and dedicated people without whom we would all be a lt worse than we need imagine. This is the story of a few of them.
Short note: If it is by Michael Lewis - BUY IT!

United States on Nov 10, 2023

Big Mama: t in this book than in the dozen other books I have read about this terrifying contagion spreading still and what must be done about it.

Germany on Jul 27, 2022

tom: This is a real historical record of what happened with this Coronavirus and why Lewis thought it happened the way it did up to 2021.
After doing some basic research I determined I purchased this book Aug 2021 after watching a “60 Minutes” program that featured Michael Lewis, the author of this book. He at the time mentioned Charity Dean and I think Richard Hatchett and Carter Meachem and others (nicknamed the Wolverines after the “Red Dawn” movie) who are all major players trying to stop this major disaster in real life.
I then read roughly half of it and then let it sit for at least 6 months by just working around it and actually ignoring it and the same time acknowledging I really needed to read the rest of the story. It was depressing to me to read.
Finally I determined that I needed to finish reading the book and have done so.
And but for the grace of God we have survived so far this Coronavirus, but not because these players did NOT do everything they could do to assist us the people to survive but because 99% of the main players that could control the Coronavirus did absolutely nothing and in actual fact hindered their assistance and help to control this...

United States on Apr 11, 2022

Anne R.: If you've ever wondered how the U.S. could have failed so completely in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, wonder no more.

This isn't another story about Trump and his fake news politics, although there is some of that. No, this is the story of how a handful of brilliant scientists, doctors and public servants saw the light at the end of the tunnel and recognized it for what it was - a massive threat to public health. This is the story of how this small group of people were denied data and found it anyway, were denied tools and resources and built them from nothing, and were denied access to the positions and power they needed to save lives, and had no recourse. This is also the story of how the CDC, an American organization that should have been on top of this issue from the first rumours, failed to protect the American public time and time again in an almost willful display of cowardice and negligence. Finally, this is the story of how over 600,000 Americans have lost their lives to date because the country has no coordinated public health system, and because it's politicians and leaders have no moral compass.

This story is a monumental tragedy.

Canada on Jul 01, 2021

Cacique33: Another good read from Michael Lewis, maybe not quite up to Undoing Project, Big Short and Blind Side, but definitely worth reading. I thought he could have reached more conclusions instead of opening the wound and leaving it bare.
The Premonition is Michael Lewis' take on the US healthcare system while the Big Short was about the financial system. The parallels are obvious. Both failed at a crucial time.
It paints a tough story about the grasping for profit in the healthcare industry and profit’s importance over any consideration of human life. It also shows the politicization of US life and how the CDC became a political tool that cares about studying but not fighting the disease while stepping aside in any criticism of its political masters. A further step in letting politics rule over reason.
In the balance of lives vs economy, the US the system put almost all its weight on the economy as bodies stacked waiting for burial. The US healthcare system is very decentralized (vs other G7 countries) and this made it unmanageable as the weak national leadership deferred to states, states to counties and so on. The strength of the decentralized system, like a chain, was only...

United States on Jun 30, 2021

Loren: Although this a book about the Covid pandemic, it reads like a well-written novel. Definitely. Worth reading.Lots of insights, from medicine to computer science to politics.

France on Jun 10, 2021

Hande Z: COVID-19 corona virus has spawned innumerable stories all across the world. Michael Thomas tells a riveting one about seven doctors known as ‘The Wolverines’, led by Carter Mecher, an internist at a Veterans Affairs Medical Centre in Chicago. The 21st century coronavirus pandemic brought these seven together as it brought them to Charity Dean, another doctor, who had taken a low paying job as the head of the Health Authority in Santa Barbera.

Lewis is a talented and experienced writer who knows how to inject excitement into all the stories he has written. COVID-19 is not just a pandemic, it has proven to be on scale, worse than the Spanish Flu of 1918. Lewis uses his characters to track how the virus surfaced in China and how it spread to the USA, unnoticed by some and ignored by others.

But this band of Wolverines was recruited like the Magnificent Seven under Chris Adams (the 1960 John Sturges movie). Chris Adams had it easy, he only had to deal with a band of Mexican bandits. Carter and the Wolverines had to figure out how to stop a deadly virus from spreading across the country, and at the same time, they had to fight his own administrators (this was in the...

United Kingdom on Jun 03, 2021

ANIL KUMAR NAYAK: Story of the unsung hero’s who work tirelessly to run the badly designed public health system. Beautifully described by the author.

India on Jun 01, 2021