0n Boxing Day 2014, a Californian public health officer called Charity Dean needed to determine if a young woman who had recently died in Santa Barbara county hospital had tuberculosis in her lungs. The disease, which is spread by coughing, had killed 1.5 million people globally that year. The local sheriff and the coroner were unwilling to help contain what could have been the start of an outbreak, however. They demanded Dean do the autopsy herself, in a car park, assuming she would balk at the task. She didn’t. As Michael Lewis describes in the opening scene of The Premonition, his new book about the Covid pandemic, Dean cut the woman’s chest open with garden shears, placed her lungs in a bucket and drove them to the laboratory.
Last year, Dean returned to that morgue with Lewis. “I don’t feel comfortable writing things unless I can see where they took place,” he explains to me over video call from his home in Berkeley, California. When they arrived, one of the sheriff’s deputies who had been present at the autopsy was there. “He went white,” laughs Lewis. “Like, ‘Oh shit, she’s back.’”
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