Lawrence Wright’s lean-limbed, immersive new work, “The Plague Year,” revisits 2020 in all of its pandemic-fueled drama. Wright tracks back through the fog to Wuhan, China, sifting through the zoologic leap (or leaps) from bats to humans. He translates the complexities of epidemiology into plain English, as in his take on the virus’s spike protein: “The surprising thing about COVID-19 is that it seems to have been an uncannily successful human disease from the start, binding a thousandfold more tightly to the ACE2 receptors than did SARS,” the 2003 disease that ravaged east Asia.

Early on, the implications of the outbreak became evident to Wuhan scientists and physicians, and government officials imposed a communications blackout. This did not deter the clinicians: “Some highly inventive dissidents rewrote the interview to get around the censors,” Wright observes, “using emojis, Morse code, Braille, and even Sindarin, the fictional language spoken by elves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit books.”

One intrepid scientist smuggled the virus’ sequenced genome into an American databank, spurring vaccine development. A triage doctor, Li Wenliang, spoke out about the rising tide of death; he became a martyr to the Chinese people after he succumbed to the disease.

Chapter by stellar chapter, Wright charts COVID-19’S arc. He is at his commanding best, though, when he places the pandemic in historical context — his detours into the Black Plague and the 1918 Spanish flu are narrative marvels — and in his portraits of the players. Deborah Birx comes off as surprisingly sympathetic. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, was instrumental in funneling personal protective equipment to desperate governors and jump-starting Operation Warp Speed, which led to breakthrough vaccines. Shi Zhengli, a Wuhan virologist known as China’s “Bat Woman,” discovered hundreds of novel coronaviruses among bats in a single mine; Wright probes her role in the ongoing debate around “lab escape.”