Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

First off, I have to say that I owe David Quammen a debt of gratitude. Years ago, I read his book Spillover, about diseases that cross over from infecting animals to infecting humans, and he explained the subject so well, and was so clear about the when-not-if expectations of future pandemics and how they were likely to come about that when covid hit, I felt right from the beginning that I had a good, useful handle on what was happening and why.

In this 2022 book, he turns his attention to covid itself. Specifically, he concentrates not on the social, personal, or political aspects of the pandemic (although he certainly allows some of his thoughts on those matters to peek through, especially his contempt for the Trump administration's show more handling of things), but on the scientific aspects. In particular, on scientists' efforts to sequence the virus's genome and trace its mutations, to develop vaccines, and to understand its origins. In that last, he includes a lot of discussion of the "lab leak hypothesis," which he concludes is not impossible but highly unlikely.

Quammen is a good and vivid writer, but he's trying to pull off a nearly impossible balancing act here. Because the scientific details are incredibly detailed, complex, and generally not very accessible to the layman. He's trying very hard to convey as full an understanding of this stuff as possible without getting incomprehensibly bogged down in the scientific weeds, and he may do as good a job as is possible at it, but even as a science-minded reader, I sometimes felt a bit overwhelmed with information and unsatisfied with my understanding of it. Even given that, though, I did find it worthwhile to have all of this laid out before me, and to get an organized retrospective on exactly what was happening in the world of epidemiology and virology in that confusing and chaotic time. And even if explaining everything both engagingly and with perfect clarity is ultimately impossible, this topic is important enough to be worth making the effort to try, and I am glad I made the effort to read. show less

Among the many general-interest Covid books out there, Quammen successfully finds his own area. However, scientific research on Covid and its origins is broad enough that the book tends to be shallow and sometimes incoherent. The motivations of the research, and therefore of Quammen's discussions, aren't always spelled out. The book's timeliness also makes it inconclusive; there are still too many loose threads. The books on Covid vaccine development and deployment, written by active participants, have narrower focuses and much more rewarding conclusions.

An exhaustively researched presentation on the quest to find the beginnings of the COVID pandemic. The author leaves no stone unturned ultimately landing on four theories about its origin. Most of the book is written in a manner that a novice like me but I would be lying if I said I didn't get lost now and then in the detailed scientific data. Ultimately, I learned much and found the book valuable and should be read widely to insure an educated informed citizenry.

To be honest, I’m not really sure why I finished this one. For one thing, it was pretty clear to me well before the halfway mark that I wasn’t really going to enjoy it or get much out of it. And I didn’t. I guess I’m just not at all interested in medical science. I read a lot of nonfiction, and a lot of it centers on subjects that are beyond my normal interests. But the one thing I’m now clear about is that I should skip the medical books.

From a more objective standpoint, though, I don’t think I would recommend this book in particular. It seems to be a general history of the pandemic, and the scientific community’s response to it. But by the end, it’s clearly just a defense against the lab-leak theory of the outbreak’s show more origin. For my part, I don’t really care much about that question. Not that it’s unimportant, but the question seems pretty complex, and I don’t think it’s something a rando like me (or you, probably) has enough understanding to parse. I’m tired of people acting like whatever knowledge they have of such a controversy is precisely the amount of knowledge necessary to discern the truth. And this book seems to be targeted at just such people.

Besides which, the facts are clearly not all in. This book came out months ago, but just last week there were new revelations about this question. And I doubt they’ll be the last. Writing, publishing, or reading such a lengthy book on the subject seems premature, at this point. I don’t feel like it was time well spent. As I said, I’m not really sure why I finished. show less

I found this informative and straightforward, and I enjoyed the look at similar diseases to Covid-19 and how those spread and were treated. We are far enough out from the start of the pandemic for there to be enough other things I'm raging over that this didn't cause too much angst for me. I don't think I would have enjoyed reading this the year it was published.

It's the first non-fiction book in English on the SARS-CoV-2 virus for the general public to include analyses of numerous science pre-prints which explain the scope and purpose of those writings. That makes Breathless essential reading for non-virologists who want to maintain an understanding of the current pandemic. Breathless has also just been published in the Italian language, with several other translations in the works. Included is a Notes/References section, where a list of sources for this book has been compiled. One website also used while writing Breathless is http://www.virological.org where virologists around the world provide early looks for their peers on current questions, data, and theories.

Breathless also makes the case show more for the continued global priority of doing whatever it takes to eliminate future spillovers of viruses, especially coronaviruses, that may otherwise continue to travel from Earth's ecosystems into our human populations.

Keep in mind that a book on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, written in the middle of that pandemic, is bound to leave a few loose ends. That's the purpose of research on these coronaviruses -- to keep expanding the boundaries of what we know. My hunch is that the COVID-19 pandemic will end someday, years from now. Thus, my family and I just bought another box of N95 masks.

PS: In November 2022, Breathless was included on the NYTimes list of the 100 best books of 2022. show less

Quammen interviewed many researchers involved in the Covid-19 pandemic during and just after the lockdown using Zoom. He has digested and presented this information for us in his usual straightforward and evenhanded way. The nature of RNA viruses, the known history of the progression of the pandemic, and various opinions on the origin of the virus are discussed. DQ occasionally goes off on a tangent, e.g. the details of Pangolin smuggling, but I found it all interesting. My edition from last year has an addendum that brings things up to date, although there hasn't been a lot of new data on the origin of the virus - the author explains why.
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There is a summary of the whole book at the end of the text that show more was largely made by abstracting what you've just finished reading. I found it unnecessary unless you aren't going to read the book.

Chapter 37, page 145: In addition, the CDC kept advising that, when local health departments could test they should focus only on people with a travel history, or people with severe symptoms... The author should explain why the CDC made this recommendation.

Chapter 69, page 279. a potluck banquet involving roughly forty thousand families [!] show less