The Premonition: A Pandemic Story Quotes
"To do the job of local public-health officer, you basically always need to be willing to lose your job."
"The simplest explanation is usually the best."
"If there is the faintest possibility of a catastrophic disease, you should treat it as being a lot more likely than it seems."
"When something doesn’t quite seem right about your diagnosis, respect the feeling, even if you can’t quite put your finger on why the diagnosis might be wrong."
"It’s the most intriguing infectious disease. My favorite infectious disease. It can do anything or be anywhere in the body."
"The world is overdue for a pandemic like that, whether it’s influenza or something else."
"People have this strong will. You feel it. You see it. It really was spiritual being in the ICU."
"If you’re a truck driver, you know you’re going to get into an accident sooner or later, so you just learn what to do if you are in an accident."
"The sin is making the same mistake twice. The best is to learn from other people’s mistakes."
"Mistakes in private-sector medicine often never saw the light of day. The grievances they spawned could be resolved quietly, by insurance companies."
"None of what happened implicated him, but he couldn’t escape it."
"You cannot put a 120-volt plug into a 240-volt outlet. Why? You can’t do it! You can’t fit it in!"
"The graph illustrated the effects on a disease of various crude strategies: isolating the ill; quarantining entire households when they had a sick person in them; socially distancing adults; giving people antiviral drugs; and so on."
"It hit me like a lightning bolt. This is it; solving this problem is why I’m here."
"The thing that Bob’s model let us do was to test our intuitions and see which of the tools we had could be successful."
"Adults just forget what it feels like to be a kid."
"It was like going to your old high school after you graduated. The buildings are all the same, but the people are totally different."
"No wonder you want people to stay behind. All that’s left of the work is what’s in their heads."
"Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence."
"I decided I would rather go to hell and become a doctor."
"The entire epidemic has been characterized by nothing so much as ambiguity."
"It isn’t that we dodged a bullet. It’s that nature shot us with a BB gun."
"She told me that if I thought it was a bad idea, I should write a memo explaining why it was a bad idea."
"The prerequisites of failure were all in place."
"You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late."
"Identify what is important and drop everything that is not."
"The movie isn’t SARS. And the case ascertainment isn’t SARS—it is more like H1N1."
"We are reactive and tend to only intervene when things are getting bad."
"It is just a matter of chance where that ember falls and whether or not anything ignites and a fire starts and begins to spread."
"What we were trying to do was a quick reckoning of what the hell was going on. So we could take action."
"We are at the equivalent of about 5:44."
"We should be treating this like we treat strokes and acute coronary syndromes where time = tissue."
"We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe."
"It wasn’t easy to get him into the state of mind in which he found himself by mid-March."
"I was no longer a crazy person. I got more of a spring in my step. More of a fuck-it attitude."
"I realized there was this arrogance, or unwillingness, to even fathom that America in 1918 might know more about this than we do right now."
"I didn’t want to manage it. I wanted to beat it."
"Most people gave it to no one; a handful gave it to twenty other people."
"What they don’t like is uncertainty. Say ‘here’s where we are and everyone needs to understand that this is going to get really bad.’"
"The practical effect was that a relative handful of people played an outsized role in the spread of the disease."
"The only clear signal you get from the virus is death."
"It wasn’t just the effects of the virus that needed to be mitigated. The effects of the culture did, too."
"You have to bring the carnage in front of people’s faces for them to see it."
"It was clear that this was the moment that she had been preparing for her entire life."
"The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible."
"A system was groping toward a solution, but the solution required someone in it to be brave, and the system didn’t reward bravery."
"It went into the bureaucracy and never came out."
"YOU JUST WANT SPECIMENS FOR RESEARCH! I WANT THEM FOR ACTUAL FRONTLINE INVESTIGATIONS!!"
"There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped."
"Why doesn’t the United States have the institutions it needs to save itself?"
"Despite the White House spin attempts, this will go down as a colossal failure of the public health system of this country."
"It is a slaughter and not just a political dispute."
"This is a person of courage and integrity."
"We are the bad example for the rest of the world."
"It is hard to fathom all the pain the virus has brought. The virus is truly a demon from hell."