La Danse Macabre: The Banality of COVID
Global pandemic inspires the mundane. Will anyone even notice?
Living through a pandemic seems like a surreal idea until you’ve lived through one. Then it’s too real. You don’t believe in it until it hits you or someone close to you. Once in a lifetime is far too frequent. Fortunately, few people suffer more than one plague in a lifetime, yet in times of resistant super-viruses, the idea is not out of mind.
The present COVID epidemic is more insidious than the Black Death or Smallpox plagues, when people reeled, wretched, and fell dead in the street, to be collected and unceremoniously heaped on to a wagon and cremated or stacked in a mass burial. In other words, COVID has less visibility, as people are quarantining, or stowed away in hospitals. It’s also a matter of scale: in the large scheme of things, COVID mortality rates haven’t approached historical tallies.
This being the case many people take a cavalier approach to vigilance in the present pandemic: what they can’t see won’t hurt them. The fake or inaccurate news reporting skews reality and inversely affects the mass acquisition and hoarding of toilet paper.
No plague was so shattering as the Bubonic (Yersinia pestis) Black Death, or Great Mortality, of 1347 — 51, for which it is estimated anywhere…
