Visiting Beijing in January to see his dying grandfather, Canadian journalist Ethan Lou unknowingly walks into a state under siege. In his journey out of China and into other hot zones in Asia and Europe, he finds himself witnessing the very earliest stages of a virus that will forever change the world as we know it. Events that may previously be isolated now ripple farther and wider and in ways we do not expect and cannot foresee. We have not seen the worst, and if and when we outlast this pandemic, nothing will ever be the same—not just healthcare systems but also economies, politics and culture. Lou shows how drastically the virus has transformed the world and charts the greater and more radical shifts to come. His ideas and arguments are framed around his journey around the world, whose path the virus seemed to follow until he landed safely in quarantine in a small town in Germany where he was able to take stock and start telling his story.