The COVID-19 pandemic is a Shakespearean mini-series in five episodes. The spring surge of 2020 took the Northeast by storm. The summer surge caught the South sleeping. The fall surge, culminating at Christmas, was ushered in by the chilly winds of the upper Midwest with the rest of the country following. A COVID-19 variant came from The UK to do battle with our efforts at vaccination. And the Summer of 2021 brought the Delta variant with new powers of transmission. In this book, David Parsons explains the forces that shaped each of these hugely different episodes. Weather, politics, population density, and lack of preparation all played their roles. But in the end, human behavior determined the course of events for both good and bad. Over the last ten years, Mr. Parsons has written six books where he shared his understanding of complex systems. The first two laid out his vision of the art of problem solving. He then compared the current architecture program at the Harvard Graduate School of design to his experience at the school in the 1960's. With sixty years of experience in computer programming, he published a short guide to artificial intelligence. With two of his granddaughters, he documented an investigation into how gravity manages to act as it does. And now, after publishing a weekly report on the COVID-19 pandemic for over a year, he takes us through a compelling exploration of why the pandemic trajectory followed its torturous course.

Adding a reflective piece to the COVID-19 puzzle, Dr. Widad Akreyi offers a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking pandemic. Will the COVID-19 crisis ever be over? What does the outlook look like in an altogether more chaotic period? How do variants impact illness severity? Do genes and gender play a part in disease risk? Are there any adverse events that happen after vaccination? What should I be watching for? If you have been asking yourself questions like these, this book has the answers for you. By combining her unsurpassable compassion and exemplary intelligence with her instant access to the latest medical research, Dr. Widad Akreyi has created a book that will be of tremendous help to you in navigating a smooth path past these trying times. Stunningly illustrated and written by an expert in the field, Anatomy of COVID Calamity supplies readers with an objective, data-driven assessment of not only the threats facing us right now, but also the problems we all will face in the years ahead. It gives you the unvarnished truth of what is known and what remains unknown with respect to Covid, making the book a key resource for all readers. Widad's compelling messages will resonate widely. Her infectious positivity will guide you in warding against the virus and moving forward.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has infected more than 219 million people and killed more than 4.5 million people worldwide. It has also impacted the socioeconomic status of affected countries and led to the fastest development of vaccines in history. Over seven sections and seventeen chapters, this book comprehensively reviews numerous aspects of COVID-19, including epidemiology, zoonosis, drug development, telehealth, the effects of the virus on healthcare workers, the importance of architecture, and urbanism in preventing future pandemics, and much more.

"MacKenzie's fascinating book gives us the scope and scale to be able to put this pandemic in perspective and, it begs the question, will we learn from this in time to prevent to next one?" —Molly Caldwell Crosby, Bestselling author of The American Plague In a gripping, accessible narrative, a veteran science journalist lays out the shocking story of how the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic happened and how to make sure this never happens again Over the last 30 years of epidemics and pandemics, we learned nearly every lesson needed to stop this coronavirus outbreak in its tracks. We heeded almost none of them. The result is a pandemic on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes. In this captivating, authoritative, and eye-opening book, science journalist Debora MacKenzie lays out the full story of how and why it happened: the previous viruses that should have prepared us, the shocking public health failures that paved the way, the failure to contain the outbreak, and most importantly, what we must do to prevent future pandemics. Debora MacKenzie has been reporting on emerging diseases for more than three decades, and she draws on that experience to explain how COVID-19 went from a potentially manageable outbreak to a global pandemic. Offering a compelling history of the most significant recent outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, H1N1, Zika, and Ebola, she gives a crash course in Epidemiology 101--how viruses spread and how pandemics end—and outlines the lessons we failed to learn from each past crisis. In vivid detail, she takes us through the arrival and spread of COVID-19, making clear the steps that governments knew they could have taken to prevent or at least prepare for this. Looking forward, MacKenzie makes a bold, optimistic argument: this pandemic might finally galvanize the world to take viruses seriously. Fighting this pandemic and preventing the next one will take political action of all kinds, globally, from governments, the scientific community, and individuals—but it is possible. No one has yet brought together our knowledge of COVID-19 in a comprehensive, informative, and accessible way. But that story can already be told, and Debora MacKenzie's urgent telling is required reading for these times and beyond. It is too early to say where the COVID-19 pandemic will go, but it is past time to talk about what went wrong and how we can do better.

While many scientists believed influenza would cause the next great pandemic, no one was prepared for the new strain of coronavirus that appeared in 2019. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has infiltrated every country and put global public health and the economy at risk. Health-care systems have been pushed to the limit as protective gear, life-saving equipment, tests, and vaccines are scarce and in high demand. From the initial infection to the widespread impact on daily life, Understanding Coronaviruses examines the intricacies of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 and how they compare to previous viruses and pandemics.

Chief Editor: Dr Emily Marr Deputy Editor (Cambridge): Alice Jin Deputy Editor (Singapore): Joycelyn Soo Mun Peng The Handbook of Pandemic Management: The Case of COVID-19 is an informal collaboration between students and academics of the University of Cambridge and of the National University of Singapore. The Handbook aims to collate, clarify, and present key information across various disciplines so that it may be of use to policymakers and organisations. We want to capture all aspects of pandemic management, medical and non-medical, as the repercussions on society and the planet stretch far beyond the biology of a virus. Therefore, we have commissioned chapters on public health, medicine, innovative design and engineering, and policy and management. Each chapter contains a discussion of current knowledge and its application, successful and unsuccessful case studies and take stock of developments across the world. Operating like a think tank, we provide analysis and advice for diverse topics including: Innovative design of PPE and medical care devices; 3D printing essential parts; digital technologies in medical care; medical AI; rapid COVID diagnostic tests; legal concerns in a pandemic; the biology and research processes behind vaccines; the anatomy behind COVID-19 swabs; psychiatry in pandemics; cost-benefit analysis in COVID-19 public policymaking; and the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare professionalism. You can find out more about our project at https://handbookofpandemicmanagement.wordpress.com

How the very fact of being human makes us vulnerable to pandemics—and gives us the power to save ourselves. The COVID-19 pandemic won’t be our last—because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. That is the uncomfortable but all-too-timely message of The Human Disease, which travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapable threat of our own making. Drawing on dozens of disciplines—from medicine, epidemiology, and microbiology to anthropology, sociology, ecology, and neuroscience—as well as a unique expertise in public education about pandemic risks, biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts identifies the human traits and tendencies that double as pandemic liabilities, from the anatomy that defines us to the misperceptions that divide us. Weaving together a wealth of personal experiences, scientific findings, and historical stories, Sholts brings dramatic and much-needed clarity to one of the most profound challenges we face as a species. Though the COVID-19 pandemic looms large in Sholts’s account, it is, in fact, just one of the many infectious disease events explored in The Human Disease. With its expansive, evolutionary perspective, the book explains how humanity will continue to face new pandemics because humans cause them, by the ways that we are and the things that we do. By recognizing our risks, Sholts suggests, we can take actions to reduce them. When the next pandemic happens, and how bad it becomes, are largely within our highly capable human hands—and will be determined by what we do with our extraordinary human brains.