The pandemic's Book of Genesis

Toward the end of June, I received an email inquiring whether I wanted a review copy of a book titled "Covid-19 & Travel: Impacts, Responses and Outcomes," by Simon Hudson (2020, Goodfellow Publishers).

This was just three-and-a-half months after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, and while I was curious to see it, it seemed inconceivable that a book of substance could be written in such a short period of time about a virus that, even today, we still understand so little about. That it could maintain relevance even a month after publication seemed, at best, a long shot.

I received my copy in late August. I am, frankly, amazed. It's an ambitious, well-researched volume, global in scope. It not only documents events into mid-June, but its speculations on "the future of travel" have not, for the most part, been disproven.

Missing, of course, are any developments from mid-June onward, an eventful 13 weeks. So let's call this the pandemic's Book of Genesis, providing a look at how, in early stages, it impacted the travel industry.

Though the book is scarcely older than a current events quarterly, it offers deep perspective. In our present lives, where the repetitiveness of days move in parallel to dramatic developments, time both elongates and contracts. The weeks fly by, but when reading about the time when there were as many cases of the virus on one cruise ship as there were in any country except China – well, it feels like a return to an era when we were still quite innocent.

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