The Long Aftermath of the 2003 SARS Epidemic: How the Pandemic that Wasn’t Presaged the Pandemic that Was

In this talk, Prof. Katherine Mason will draw upon insights from her 2016 book, Infectious Change, to explore the connections between the 2003 SARS epidemic and the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic response in China. The talk examines how public health reforms in China following the SARS outbreak laid the groundwork for China's response to COVID. We will consider what lessons can be learned from SARS and from the contrast between China's COVID response and the broader global response over the course of the past year.

Professor Mason is the author of Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), winner of the 2019 Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize of the British Sociological Association. She is an active participant in analyses of the novel coronavirus with reference to her deep knowledge of the 2003 SARS pandemic and how it led to fundamental changes in the structure and function of China's public health administration.