This is Outside Inn, I'm Nate Hedgy.

For years, science writer Ed Yang was the guy who covered quirky animal stories.

Headlines include the sharks that live to 400, a new origin story for dogs, the life, times, and departure of Bowbow the Panda.

But then, a couple of years before COVID-19 up-ended the world, Ed wrote a long-form feature.

A call to the next plague is coming, is America ready. So it was about the inevitability of a big

pandemic and the fact that this country, much like the rest of the world, was not prepared for it.

At the time, he was a staff writer for Atlantic magazine.

They made a video to go along with the story and when I watched it I had to do a double take because it was eerily predictive.

Natural disasters bring communities together, but outbreaks tear them apart.

They make people frightened over their neighbors. To counter that, communities need

clear-headed leaders, reliable information, and a unifying spirit.

This story? It was from 2018,

and it argued that in a theoretical pandemic,

hospitals would be overwhelmed,

that we'd run out of ventilators and critical care beds, that the Trump administration

would be unprepared to stop the spread.

So when COVID-19 did arrive, Ed, unlike a lot of us, was ready.

It is a rare thing to be in exactly the right time and place and have the right skills to help out in a moment of global catastrophe and to do work that helps millions of people.

I never really imagined being in that position, but it was also just crushing. shame.

This is outside in, I'm Nate Hedgy. And today on the show, a conversation with the writer Ed Yang.

He was one of America's most prominent pandemic

journalists until that reporting burned him out. Physically, emotionally things

...