How Contagion Works
By Paolo Giordano
Last year, when COVID-19 was just about beginning to rear its ugly head in Italy, Italian physicist and bestselling novelist Giordano’s article, The Mathematics of Contagion, published in his home country got shared more than four million times. The essay that, in a way, shaped and changed conversation around the pandemic is now available in a slim 68-page book. Giordano began writing this piece on February 29 last year, when the confirmed cases of infection had surpassed the 85,000 threshold, and the death toll 3,000. The essay, now split into short chapters, examines how small mistakes go a long way in intensifying the spread of infection. Like a simple quarantine dilemma of whether to go for a friend’s birthday party when the WHO is telling people “to avoid gatherings,” and what would happen if everyone landed at the venue. His piece leaves a stellar impact, when he says, how “in the contagion, science has disappointed us”.
Price: Rs 255

COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction
By Dr Anirban Mahapatra