How Contagion Works

Book excerpt: The groundbreaking, moving essay on the coronavirus pandemic shared over 4 million times in Italy and published in 25 countries around the world-which lucidly explains how disease spreads and how our interconnectedness will save us. "Lucid, calm, informed, directly helpful in trying to think about where we are now... The literature of the time after begins here." --Evening Standard (UK) In this extraordinarily elegant work written from lockdown in Italy as the crisis deepened day to day, Paolo Giordano, the internationally bestselling writer of The Solitude of Prime Numbers with a PhD in physics, shows us what this outbreak really is about: human interconnectedness. Illuminating the big picture of how the disease spreads with great simplicity and mathematical insight and placing it in the context of other modern crises like climate change and xenophobia, Giordano reveals how battling the pandemic is ultimately about realizing how inextricably linked all our lives are and acting accordingly. Both timely and timeless, How Contagion Works is an accessible, deeply felt meditation on what it means to confront this pandemic both as individuals and as a community and empowers us not to show fear in the face of it.