Every plague must have its point. That’s been more or less the universal human response to sudden or unexpected bursts of pestilence, of the kind that seem to put not just individuals but entire societies at risk, for as long as we have kept records, literary and narrative, of what happens when these things happen. The truth that there is a constant, unending, and unpredictable warfare between human and bug, which takes place in a state of moral indifference, at least on the bug’s side, is somehow profoundly counterintuitive. This war, of course, takes place not just between human and microbe but engages all life on earth, with each living thing in a constant state of unequal warfare with microscopic bugs of all kinds, parasites and bacteria and viruses. [...]
Again and again, in the history of illness, we find the same desire to attach a moral to a microbe. Even as late as the nineteenth century, when scientific medicine was just beyond the toddler stage, the idea that a “miasma” was responsible for cholera was widespread among even educated people, and with it came a moralizing: the poor and the immigrants died because they were always in sickness, or brought it with them, or kept it inside them. [...]
One of the ironies of the moment is that, where it’s been the usual path, in modern times, to find small, incremental measures having big effects on public problems, in this case, big, seemingly outsize measures—cancelling public activities, closing schools and offices—are necessary to create the small changes in vectors that can at least manage the pandemic. This novelty perhaps explains why it is so hard to wrap our minds around the changes: it turns out that it is possible for something to be at once a huge public-health crisis while creating, so far, a minimal number of visible, obvious cases of illness.
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