FIELD NOTES FROM A PANDEMIC

Ethan Lou witnessed the earliest stages of the COVID-19 crisis when visiting China to see his ailing grandfather—and then unexpectedly traversed other hot zones around the world.

When Lou left Toronto in January 2020, the novel coronavirus had barely registered in the minds of North Americans and others in the West. There were no travel advisories, no quarantines, no daily death tolls reported across mainstream media. Everything was fine. And then it wasn't. In his journey out of China and into other parts of Asia and Europe, then still amid normalcy, Lou repeatedly relives the lockdown he left behind, witnessing the raw effects of a plague that will forever change the world as we know it.

Part travelogue, part pandemic deep-dive, the book will chart the societal impact of the current crisis and what it says about us and our future.

Ethan Lou was formerly on staff at Reuters, and has also written for publications around the world, including The Guardian, The South China Morning Post, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Maclean's, and The Walrus. He is the author of another forthcoming book, Once a Bitcoin Miner. Lou has been a visiting journalist at the University of British Columbia.