9 November

Before the 20th century, overwhelmingly the greatest fatalities in war came from infectious disease, not the fighting. The US Civil War, for example, where about 700,000 people died. Two-thirds of those died of diarrhoea and dysentery. Some people don't like comparing the pandemic to a war, despite (as I said yesterday) Covid so far having killed more people than WW1. But wars are already pandemics, the fighting in history has killed far fewer people than the epidemics the wars created. We're in a world war right now, possibly the biggest ever. And people seem to think it's as good as over, and are booking their international holidays. Total divorce from reality, we're a society of children, throwing 'we can't live like this' tantrums because it's all too hard.