Apocalypse last year (and now): A Yale professor and a magazine journalist document the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak in ‘Apollo’s Arrow’ and ‘The Plague Year’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 30, 2021

Although the world is still beset by Covid-19, even in nations where wide swaths of the population have been vaccinated, the publishing world began to produce volumes on the pandemic last year. One of the first to appear, in October, was Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Its author, Nicholas A. Christakis, is a physician and sociologist. He has appointments to five different departments in addition to other positions that he holds at Yale University.

Christakis approaches the pandemic like the polymath he is. The book begins with a passage from Homer’s Iliad in which Apollo unleashes a plague that spreads from mules and dogs to the army of Greeks besieging Troy. The text then walks readers through China’s discovery of a cluster of severe acute respiratory syndrome cases in Wuhan. Officials initially attempted to suppress or ignore information on the illness before acknowledging, at the end of December 2019, that they were facing a serious problem.

To their credit, China responded with what Christakis calls “the largest imposition of public health measures in human history,” including the placement of toothpick dispensers in elevators so passengers could push buttons without exchanging germs. By April, the nation seemed to have successfully suppressed the disease:

[T]he enormous reduction in cases once China mobilized to control the epidemic was an astonishing achievement from a public health point of view, even if some of the Chinese numbers were fuzzy.

To be clear, China, and other countries that subsequently implemented their own lockdowns, had not eradicated the virus; it had merely temporarily stopped its spread. When the lockdowns were lifted, the virus would come back.