What's it been like to watch the coronavirus pandemic unfold nearly three decades after I wrote that a pandemic would unfold in pretty much this way? It's induced a strange vertigo, to be honest. It's also sparked an unfamiliar kind of solipsism, enough to make me wonder: If I had made the case for surveillance and preparation more forcefully back then -- that is, if I had written a better book -- would we be here now?

Still, there's something enlightening about reading the book's stories about the epidemics from the last century, when new viruses kept emerging, raging through a population, and eventually dying out. But never since the 1918-19 influenza pandemic has any been on this scale, and never with this ferocious mixture of transmissibility and lethality. We almost learned the right lessons in the 1990s, and then we ignored them; maybe this time, with prediction having become reality, the lessons will stick.