As this year has proven, leaders’ words matter. Whether in the form of speeches, briefings, statements, interviews, or tweets, their words shape what we do. This is especially true when we are all locked inside and craving a shared experience, a steady hand, and a hopefulness that this will end. If we all do our part. The best leaders get us to care about each other, convince us that our choices matter on a grand scale. In the time of coronavirus, this was not an abstract idea; it was an issue of life and death.
As I scoured through what would become thousands of pages of transcripts to patch together a narrative of the pandemic, a problem quickly arose. If we limited the book to elected officials, I couldn’t just include the words of those with whom I agreed. But I also couldn’t construct a story of the virus, its effects, and the country’s response to it with so much false information in it. What was needed was a steady bassline: data, scientists, academics, and journalists. After that, I brought in business leaders and union reps and hospital spokespeople and advocacy groups to track the social, economic, and racial story that was unfolding alongside the medical one.
I started on New Year’s Eve when Dr. Li Wenliang shared a message on social media about seven patients who had come into Wuhan Central Hospital. Then I traced the spread, not just of the virus, but the viewpoints, ideas, and disputes that were spreading as well. I followed it east to Washington State, tracking what was happening, who was warning and who was downplaying, who seemed prepared and who didn’t.
I followed the spread to Europe, the cruise ships, the spikes in New York and New Orleans, communities of color, old-age homes, prisons, and factories. Then I tracked how the virus was spilling over into America itself: its divisions, its class structure, its public debates, its understanding of what personal freedom entailed, what community meant, and what government was even for.
And in doing so, I found that the book seemed to be kind of a solution. Our ecosystem is literally killing us because we never get the big picture view. Everything floods in and we can’t slow it down and it won’t stop. What began as an exercise became a buoy in a sea of noise. There was something to be gained by sitting down with each day and asking: Who, from where, said what when? It was journalism 101 in a single question. As we got to late May, I saw how the larger narrative fit into a five act structure: The Arrival, The Emergency, The Lockdown, The Reopening, The Reckoning.