The Premonition by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

SEVEN

The Redneck Epidemiologist

It had been more than a decade since they’d served together in the White House, but whenever Richard Hatchett wanted to noodle over some problem, his first impulse was to write to Carter Mecher. Richard had moved to London back in 2017 to run a curious new organization called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. CEPI, as it was simply and thankfully known, had been funded by European governments, the Gates Foundation, and others with deep pockets to develop new vaccines, and faster ways to make them. On January 8, 2020, Richard had been going back and forth with Carter on something or other when Carter changed the subject. Carter’s mind had drifted from the assigned task to a new and more interesting one. “On a different note,” he wrote, “I saw that a novel coronavirus was isolated in the China outbreak.”

Carter had been back in Atlanta for nine years. He’d left the White House at the end of President Obama’s first term and returned to the Veterans Health Administration in Atlanta. The people around him either never knew, or soon forgot, where he’d been for the previous six years, and what he’d done there. No one ever brought up the White House, or pandemics. As he’d given up his position running hospitals, the VA just called him “senior medical adviser,” which meant that he could do pretty much anything he wanted to do, wherever he wanted to do it. “They just sort of forgot Carter existed,” said Richard.

Every now and then someone gave Carter a task, but mostly he found problems on his own inside the VA and worked on them. He became curious how the VA’s hospital staff used their sick leave, for instance, and figured out that the number of sick days taken by nurses correlated strongly with flu activity—so that you could use flu activity to predict nurse shortages. For a long stretch he worked on making the hospitals more efficient. The Veterans Health Administration, soon after Carter returned to it, had gotten into hot water after veterans complained about long wait times: one guy who had waited six months to see a cardiologist had died of a heart attack before his first appointment. “So the question is, Why is that occurring?” asked Carter. “Is it because the doctors are so busy and overworked and understaffed that patients are backed up, or is it because the practice is inefficient?” He found a woman named Eileen Moran, who’d been working on how to measure the performance of the VA’s doctors. She was not popular with the VA’s top brass. “They wanted to shut her down,” said Carter, “but I looked into it and I said, ‘This is really good!’ ” Carter teamed up with Moran to create a system that allowed the VA to see, when veterans weren’t being cared for, whether the problem in any given case was a shortage of doctors or a deficiency in the way those doctors practiced medicine.

All of which

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