9 April

A wise epidemiologist asked recently why we aren't asking the humanities about the best way to deal with a pandemic. Pandemics are social phenomena, not just medical, you can't separate the two. The social challenges they bring are reflected right down to the level of the microbes, where the pathogen upsets the community balance of other microbes. Camus wrote probably the definitive book on all pandemics, capturing the social and the medical at the same time (he didn't see them as separate). "Authorities are liable to minimize the threat of an epidemic, Camus suggests, until the evidence becomes undeniable that UNDERREACTION IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN OVERREACTION. Most people share that tendency, he writes, it’s a universal human frailty." https://lithub.com/what-we-can-learn-and-should-unlearn-from-albert-camuss-the-plague/