The coroner refuses to help with the procedure and instead hands her a pair of gardening shears, hoping to deter her. After appealing to the sheriff, Dean is allowed to biopsy the lung. (Until Covid-19, tuberculosis had been the world’s leading cause of death from an infectious agent.) To grasp the extent of the threat, Dean hopes to examine a bit of lung tissue from a young woman who has just died, in December of 2014, but she’s thwarted by a grouchy, 70-something local coroner. Early in The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, Michael Lewis’s new nonfiction book recounting how the foresight of a small group of people culminated in breakthrough strategies for containing Covid-19, Charity Dean, Santa Barbara County’s newly appointed public health officer, senses there might be an outbreak of airborne tuberculosis, an easily transmittable illness that often spreads in hard-to-trace ways.
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