![]() I think we’re mostly used to only preparing for weather events, like hurricanes or blizzards, where you might lose basic services like water and electricity. Empty shelves at a grocery store in Paris on March 16, 2020. But the mass run on things like bottled water - in a pandemic, the water is going to keep running. So far there hasn’t been a lot of violence, which is great, and I hope it never happens. I’m starting to see that with panic buying. Then you have what’s called second- and third-order effects, where other people start to get hurt. Because, number one, you can’t fix the problem if you’re too busy losing your mind. You’ve got to make sure you keep your head when things appear dark all around you. People lose their minds and they do irrational things and they hurt each other. Unfortunately, that happens in many crises. But according to the book, more people die from the panic than the actual infection. Different countries experience the Great Panic at different times. In World War Z, there’s the outbreak that causes people to become zombies, but then there’s something called the “Great Panic,” when people start to freak out and take drastic measures, like heading north because they’ve heard that the zombies can’t survive the cold. If there was ever a time for clarity and facts, this is it. Panic is the one thing we do not need right now. I’m starting to see that, and that is very scary. When you stick your head in the sand and you deny something, and you keep denying it long enough, then suddenly you get caught up in the problem and you’re not prepared for the problem, that’s when you panic. ![]() ![]() That’s not just society - that’s individuals. We’ve been in denial too long, and panic is the fruit of denial. Well, I mean, I think, at this point, today, our biggest enemy is panic because we’re reaching that mass psychological tipping point. We spoke on March 13, one of the biggest days yet for a wave of pandemic-related closures and suspensions of businesses, institutions, sports, schools, and more in the US. ![]() So I called up Brooks, who was at home in California, to talk about his book, American history, and what needs to be done right now. The parallels between Brooks’s novel and our reality are eerie, from China trying to cover up the spread of the virus early on to a US-based outbreak occurring just 45 minutes north of New York City to opportunists hawking a fake cure to the American response being slowed due to the virus emerging during an election year - and that’s just the beginning.ĩ questions about the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, answered Now, faced with the Covid-19 pandemic (which is not quite as severe as the one caused by Solanum), I haven’t been able to stop thinking about World War Z. But the novel is much better, and beloved among zombie enthusiasts and foreign policy wonks alike for the way it shows how cultural factors shape different countries’ responses to the virus and how those responses play out in the face of a global pandemic. World War Z was adapted into a movie in 2013, starring Brad Pitt as a man who manages to essentially save the world from a zombie apocalypse. (Three years earlier, Brooks had published The Zombie Survival Guide, a “humorous” guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse, and the fictional journalist performing the “interviews” that make up World War Z is also named Max Brooks.) In 2006, author Max Brooks published World War Z, an “oral history” of the world following an apocalypse in which a highly infectious fictional virus called Solanum first pops up in China then spreads across the world, turning scores of people into zombies.
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