It was a very timely read when the pandemic began. It’s filled with cautionary tales and lessons we can learn from the previous pandemics and epidemics that happened, both as nations and as individuals.

Reading it filled me with awe and regret — awe because of how similar things are going now with the past pandemics, and regret because of how poorly we managed this whole thing with the plethora of cautions from scientists and the several research paper in virology and epidemiology at our fingertips.

Every chapter I read, I thought, “Had people read this before this whole thing started,” or “Do people know about this book? How come the government didn’t do anything about it.” But it’s too late now to point fingers.

I’m still glad that I’ve read it despite not having the power nor the capacity to make a difference in the current pandemic. As a researcher and an artist, I’m hoping that I can use the practical and ideal solutions I can find in this book to do better Science in the future.

Through this book, I also realized that to mobilize the people, you need more than a scientific idea, you also need to create something more accessible to them, perhaps a book, an online community, an artwork, to make the information more available to the public. Science should be a tool to make positive changes, and it wouldn’t be possible if the knowledge can only be understood and accessed by a few.