22 July

Nobody knows why pandemics end. The explanation I haven’t seen suggested is that it’s other microbes that end them. We’re so focused on ourselves and the impact a virus has on our bodies that we forget that all microbes live in communities, just like us. A pandemic is when one microbe manages to persuade all the others to support it for some length of time. But there comes a point when the other microbes say yeh-nah, your time’s up. Just like a pop band might sell a lot of music for a year and then the community turns on them and suddenly they disappear. Exactly the same phenomenon.