Unprepared

America in the Time of Coronavirus

Jon Sternfeld

"An essential volume." —E. J. Dionne, Jr. * "A damning portrait" —Publishers Weekly

With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner Timothy Egan, the riveting, eye-opening first-draft history of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unprepared is the sweeping history of the Covid-19 pandemic—a raw, primary-source accounting of the epoch-­defining event: a virus that first appeared in China in late 2019 and spread rapidly across the globe, killing hundreds of thousands, devastating economies, and changing the modern world forever. A day-by-day chronicle of the response to Covid-19 as it attacked, Unprepared gathers a range of public statements from President Trump and his administration, elected officials such as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, leading journalists and scientists, and organizations from National Nurses United to the United Food and Commercial Workers union. A haunting portrait of the world scrambling for answers while the number of cases rose alongside the death toll, the book reveals not only our strengths as a people, but also the fault lines and dysfunction that plague our nation in the new millennium.
Unprepared is an illuminating artifact for today and for future generations, an astonishing document of history being made, and a multifaceted narrative that drops the reader directly into the real-time experience of confusion, drama, and fear that defines the outbreak of Covid-19.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction by Timothy Egan
• Author’s Note by Jon Sternfeld
• The Arrival: December 31–January 30
• The Emergency: January 31–March 14
• The Lockdown: March 15–April 19
• The Opening: April 20–May 24
• The Reckoning: May 25–June 5
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• A Note on the Authors
• Copyright