How many articles have you read about the coronavirus? |
If you’re like me, it’s well into the hundreds, maybe the thousands. Especially in the pandemic’s early days, here in New York, I felt as if I was inhaling information, desperate for anything that explained why the world had turned upside down, and how to right it. |
As I googled, I found “The Hammer and the Dance,” by Tomás Pueyo, which appeared in March on Medium and has reached millions of readers. The article cleared away the brush, put the pandemic in context and told me how the world would need to move forward. |
I kept reading Tomás, as he wrote his many pieces on Medium. So, when I joined The Times Opinion team in June as the Op-Ed editor, one of my first calls was to Donald McNeil, the world health reporter, whose own work has been pathbreaking. And I asked him — is this guy for real? |
I mean, he’s not an epidemiologist. He has an M.B.A. from Stanford, and works at a tech start-up. Donald, it turns out, talks to him all the time. And it turns out that Tomás does understand infectiousness. As someone who studies how ideas “go viral” on the web, he instantly grasped how one infection, growing exponentially, could become hundreds in one month and millions soon after that. |
(Donald, who has a B.A. in rhetoric, is also not an epidemiologist, but learned on the job. “I went to the University of Interviewing Tony Fauci,” he said.) |
When I talked with Tomás, I found someone deeply enmeshed in the data and the policy, who thinks about this pandemic into the fifth dimension. For The Times, Tomás decided to seek an answer to a nagging and crucial question — why have efforts to control the pandemic failed? |
This article is like many of Tomás’s pieces in Medium: he defines a problem, he shows you how common it is. He proposes a solution, and shows how that is working, or not working, and why. |
But this article is also a true collaboration with The Times and two of our Opinion graphics editors, Nathaniel Lash and Yaryna Serkez. With Tomás, they mined and analyzed the statistics. And they made the piece come alive with multimedia that clearly explains what’s happening in the United States and in the world. |
I hope that you can spend some time with it. And consider what Tomás has to say — the analysis, solutions and implications for the way we live. |
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