Pop the word Covid-19 into any online book store and you will see the ever growing series of titles on the pandemic. Between the conspiracy theories and medical manuals there are a small number of though provoking works trying to make sense of the science, economics and ecology of the coronavirus.
Richard Horton’s The Covid-19 Catastrophe (Polity, £12.99) is one of the strongest works to date. Its subtitle – What’s gone wrong and how to stop it happening again – makes clear the authors’ focus on the failures of science and government to get to grips with the pandemic, and what we need to do when the next virus comes.