What began as an effort by two doctors to make sense of COVID-19 as it spread grew into a book that captures the trauma and drama wreaked by the never-before-seen virus.
“The COVID Diaries: 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion as It Happened” is a collection of published essays that chronicle the pandemic, without what the authors call the inevitable rewriting of history as time passes.
“The book is for people who want to understand what they lived through,” said co-author Robert Weinstein, MD, professor of internal medicine at Rush Medical College and a prominent infectious disease specialist.
Five years ago, Weinstein and Cory Franklin, MD, began writing a series of commentaries about COVID-19 as the virus sickened and killed millions and upended everyday life around the world.
“What Bob and I tried to do was describe and analyze all the issues that arose during the pandemic in a medically understandable but nonpolitical fashion,” said Franklin, a former director of medical intensive care at Cook County Hospital and lead author of the book.
Snapshots of the pandemic in real time
From March 2020 to 2024, Weinstein and Franklin shared facts about the virus as they were learned and addressed issues and controversies as they developed, from the origin of SARS-CoV-2 to the public health response, such as stay-at-home orders, vaccines, and masking. They penned 60 columns in all, the bulk of them published by the Chicago Tribune.
“We thought it would be helpful to put all of this together in one place as a historical document,” Weinstein said, adding he hopes the book “will help people now and in the future to appreciate what they survived.”
In the collection of real-time perspectives, the authors highlight the steep learning curve for COVID-19, from the hope of containing it to the changing understanding of how. The first five essays are grouped in the opening chapter titled “Naïve Optimism.”
The first essay, dated March 18, 2020, is Weinstein’s favorite. “It gives a very nice introduction to the problem of the novel coronavirus,” he said. “And it talks about the things people can do to protect themselves, and what was quickly learned about the importance of masking.”
Titled “Doctor’s advice: What We Can Do Now to Slow the Coronavirus,” the essay closes by asking what summer 2020 would be like. “How long will this last? Will warmer weather put an end to the spread?... Will we be watching the Cubs and White Sox this summer?” The questions are a reminder that as spring arrived in 2020, it was impossible to imagine how COVID-19’s effect would grow for weeks, then months and even years.
“We’ve moved forward, but the effects of COVID-19 are still with us,” Weinstein said.
Franklin added: “We were working with incomplete information as the pandemic evolved. We didn’t get everything right at the time, no one did, but reading it today, much of what we wrote stands the test of time.”
“The COVID Diaries: 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion as It Happened” is available at Amazon.com.
