In The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics, Osterholm and his co-author and longtime collaborator Mark Olshaker weave together two threads. One is an assessment of how the COVID-19 pandemic was handled by the US government and public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. ...

The next pandemic is the focus of the other strand of the book, a "thought experiment" developed by Osterholm and Olshaker that traces the path of a hypothetical virus that originates in Somalia, soon jumps to a nearby refugee camp in Kenya, and then spreads like wildfire around the globe. The virus, eventually labeled SARS-CoV-3, combines the infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 with the lethality of the original SARS virus (which caused a global outbreak in 2003) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus.

"What would happen if you had a virus that had the capacity to infect like COVID, but the ability to kill like MERS or SARS?" asks Osterholm, who is also a Regents Professor and the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Public Health at the University of Minnesota. "And believe it or not, we have now found viruses—in bats in caves in China—that have that construct. So this is not just science fiction; we actually know these viruses exist." #PublicHealth #bookstodon https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/wake-covid-osterholm-takes-big-one-new-book