Journal of A Pandemic Year
In January 2020, two award-winning history professors set out to track the medical and media phenomena surrounding the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China. What started as a side-project quickly became an all-consuming, effort to make sense of a global pandemic. Based on extensive research, contributions from a national team of experts, dozens of interviews, and hundreds of collected stories, Drs. Margaret Peacock and Erik L. Peterson set out to examine the intersecting crises that plagued the nation. They revealed a health structure rooted in a culture of acute care that was hobbled by entrenched racial hierarchies, lasting economic disparity, and a willful historical amnesia. These factors more than anything else led to the pandemics of disease, disinformation, poverty, and violence that caused such unimaginable catastrophe.