Second paragraph of third chapter:

The government [of South Korea] seemed to do the impossible, which was to ‘crunch the curve’, rather than just flatten it, and to do it without a lockdown. This model would go on to influence other countries across the world that had to make rapid decisions on what to do, and could follow a tried and tested East Asian 2020 playbook.

A book about public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, written in late 2021 so at the point that things were dying down, though still in the heat of the moment. The author is professor of global public health in Edinburgh, and was also one of the key advisors to Nicola Sturgeon during the pandemic.

The book carefully but passionately looks at the responses of many different governments to the pandemic, singling out South Korea and New Zealand for praise. She is very critical of the US and UK responses, or rather of the leadership of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, neither of whom took the crisis seriously early enough to mitigate huge damage to their respective societies. In both cases she also sees a failure to look at what other countries were doing successfully, and learn from them. She has little time for the UK’s SAGE group of experts who were, in her view, fighting the wrong war.

At the same time, she deals efficiently with the myth that the lockdowns caused more harm than good – the fact is that Sweden, which tried the lockdown-lite approach, eventually had to do the same as all other European countries. The real problem was a lack of clear strategy and failure to mobilise resources properly (oddly enough borne out by recent comments from Dominic Cummings). She also deals briefly with the ‘lab leak’ theory of the virus’s origin, noting that the DNA evidence is against it.

She also writes about the sheer nastiness of some of the media commentary and the personal attacks on her on social media. It all takes a toll, and I don’t think that the government advisers during the flu pandemic of 1919 faced the same problems.

It’s a humane and approachable book, and you can get it here.