What We’re Reading: Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World By Fareed Zakaria “Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World” by Fareed Zakaria was named Amazon’s Best Book of October 2020, and for good reason. In the book, Zakaria, an Indian-American journalist and policy adviser, tackles the most pressing problem of the year: the spread of the coronavirus and its impact on many parts of society. Though the book doesn’t offer a deep analysis of the situation, it does lay out the main challenges that the post-COVID-19 world will face, as well as 10 key lessons that ought to be learned from the pandemic. (In my opinion, however, the book was published prematurely, considering that the pandemic is far from over and only getting worse.) In each chapter, Zakaria offers recommendations for how states can handle the future problems brought on by the pandemic. The pandemic has exposed, according to Zakaria, many governments’ serious shortcomings, all of which existed long before the outbreak began but were less visible. For example, the world was long moving toward digitalization, and the pandemic only sped up the transition and implementation of more information technologies. In addition, the increases in inequality that many countries will see post-pandemic were long […]