Field Notes from a Pandemic

A Journey Through a World Suspended

Author  Ethan Lou
Field Notes from a Pandemic

A CBC Best Canadian Nonfiction Book of 2020
 
In a book equal parts travelogue and pandemic guide, the journalist Ethan Lou examines the societal effects of COVID-19 and takes us on a mesmerizing journey around a world that will never be the same.

Visiting Beijing in January 2020 to see his dying grandfather, the Canadian journalist Ethan Lou unknowingly walks into a state under siege. In his journey out of China and—unwittingly—into other hot zones in Asia and Europe, he finds himself witnessing the very earliest stages of a virus that will forever change the world as we know it.

Lou argues that the coronavirus outbreak will have a far greater impact than SARS, for example, simply because China is now many…