Laurie Garrett is an expert in contagious diseases, and predicted a similarly deadly disease that halted humanity in her 1994 bestseller The Coming Plague. This was around the time that Laurie started being in high demand, after she predicted and reported on the impact of HIV and won a Pulitzer for her reported work on Ebola in 1996.

What else has she predicted?

For one, she doesn’t think the impacts of the virus are going to end any time soon. Laurie predicts at least 36 months before anything begins to slow down. “I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” she added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”

Laurie also says that even after all this is over, we won’t be going “back to normal” as everyone keeps saying. “This is history right in front of us,” Garrett said. “Did we go ‘back to normal’ after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an antiterror state. And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this.”

One thing she said she never could have predicted? How the U.S. has responded to the epidemic. Laurie states that the U.S. has always been less than concerned with matters of public health, but now leadership is going out of its way to be unhelpful. Most of her frustration comes from the U.S. refusing to communicate with 0ther countries instead of working together to find a cure.

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