A CBC Best Canadian Nonfiction Book of 2020
In a book equal parts travelogue and pandemic guide, the journalist
Ethan Lou examines the societal effects of COVID-19 and takes us on a
mesmerizing journey around a world that will never be the same.
Visiting Beijing in January 2020 to see his dying grandfather, the
Canadian journalist Ethan Lou unknowingly walks into a state under
siege. In his journey out of China and--unwittingly--into other hot
zones in Asia and Europe, he finds himself witnessing the very earliest
stages of a virus that will forever change the world as we know it.
Lou argues that the coronavirus outbreak will have a far greater impact
than SARS, for example, simply because China is now many more times
integrated with the increasingly interconnected world. Over decades,
globalization has crafted a world painfully sensitive and susceptible to
shocks such as this pandemic. A crisis like it has thus been long
overdue--and we have yet to see it unfold fully. In our integrated
world, events that may previously be isolated now ripple farther and
wider and in ways we do not expect and cannot foresee. We have not seen
the worst, and if and when we outlast this pandemic, nothing will ever
be the same. Decisions now--or indecisions--will shape and define the
world for decades.
These ideas are fleshed out through the virus's spawning and how it
spread, the unprecedented measures to contain it and an examination of
past pandemics and other crises and how they shaped the world--and an
argument for why this one's different. Lou shows how drastically the
virus has transformed the world and charts the greater and more radical
shifts to come. His ideas and arguments are framed around his
unintentionally tumultuous journey around the world, whose path the
virus seemed to follow until he landed safely in quarantine in a small
town in Germany, where he was able to take stock and start telling his
story.
