Breathless by David Quammen

This is subtitled: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, and it is the story of COVID from 2019 up through Omicron. I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially to people who are not well versed in science and who want to better understand the recent pandemic. This is scientifically sound while being extremely readable and understandable. Covid-19 is the first pandemic in which molecular genomics has been applied at scale. Thanks to this science, researchers were able to publish the genome of the novel coronavirus, Sars-CoV-2, in record time and keep pace with the emergence of new variants. And thanks to the allied science of molecular phylogenetics, a method for reading the deep evolutionary history of viruses, we have been able to trace its divergence from other known coronaviruses, including other Sars-like coronaviruses harbored by bats and whose genetic codes are stored in labs in China and other parts of the world. He takes on the the origins of Sars-CoV-2, which have been the subject of feverish debate: was it the result of a natural spillover from animals or was the virus engineered in a lab and unleashed upon the world, either by accident or design? He walks us through viruses, the tricky jump from animal to human, and then in the case of COVID, the very clear data that it hops back from human to animal. All told, he brings the reader up to date on what we know and when we knew it up until the time he published it.