The virus had the potential to kill, but the real threat to life came from us.
In this global overview of different countries' responses to the pandemic of 2020, we see that the key factors that determined success or failure were not to do with geography, preparedness or vaccines. They were social: how much we trust each other and our government; whether we value the collective or the individual; whose lives matter to us and who we're willing to leave in harm's way.
Drawing on research conducted across multiple continents, Klinenberg shows how leaders in London and Washington made the crisis so much more lethal than was necessary, while scientists, citizens and policy makers in Australia, Japan and Taiwan worked together to save lives. He explains why and how countries as various as South Korea, Germany and Brazil took their own particular paths. Interwoven throughout is an intimate account of seven lives - including a school principal, a bar manager, a transport worker and a political aide - in the global epicentre of the pandemic, New York, which shows how decisions taken at the top played out in people's lives.
As this book shows, the pandemic brought devastation but it also brought clarity, revealing for better and worse who we really are and a set of principles for how we might approach the next catastrophe differently.

Eric Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the co-author of the bestseller Modern Romance and author of Palaces for the People, Going Solo, Heat Wave and Fighting for Air. He has contributed to the Guardian, New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Rolling Stone and Wired. He lives in New York City.