In countries like mine, we might have become inured to the threat of a global pandemic because we saw so many "This Is the Big One" threats flaming out, confined to regions that felt comfortably remote. Except for AIDS, raging epidemics have tended not to go global: SARS in 2003 pretty much stayed in Asia, MERS in 2012 didn't really leave the Middle East, Ebola in 2014 was mostly a West African scourge. As we kept watching ourselves dodge a bullet, it was easy to attribute susceptibility in other countries to behaviors that didn't exist in ours. Most of us didn't ride camels, didn't eat monkeys, didn't handle live bats or civet cats in the marketplace.

This "othering" of the threat has, in many ways, been our undoing all along. In rereading my book recently, I found a sentence that highlights the persistence of this shameful attitude. "Ask a field virologist what constitutes an epidemic worth looking into," I wrote, "and he'll answer with characteristic cynicism, 'The death of one white person.'"