17cated, but it has not escaped the rumor,
panic, and hysteria that break out when
unknown diseases strike, as Thucydides
and Procopius so chillingly once detailed.
Global population is nearing 8 billion,
and little more than 3,000 worldwide are
known to have died from COVID-19.
Still, in my rural hometown of Selma, in
isolated central California, I conducted an
experiment today to see whether dispos-
able medical gloves, face masks, and
hand cleansers were still in full supply at
the three national chain drug and food
stores. All were sold out.
For all our millennia of scientific ad -
vancements, we know approximately as
much about COVID-19 as Sophocles and
Thucydides knew about the effects of the
Athenian plague. How exactly does it
spread differently from the flu? Are there
unknown millions of infected who are not
sure when, or even if, they became sick?
How did COVID-19 originate—from
Chinese bats, snakes, and pangolins in
the open-air food markets of Wuhan? Or
did the coronavirus strain escape from
the oddly proximate Wuhan Institute
of Virology of the Chinese Academy ofuncivilized behavior so chillingly de -
scribed nearly a millennium earlier by
Thucydides: the crass treatment of the
unburied, the avoidance of the infected,
the desperation to live wildly in the
expectation of impending death, and an
equally pernicious outbreak of nihilism,
superstition, and self-pity.
The medieval outbreak in Europe of the
Black Plague (1347–51) likely killed
more than the Athenian and Justinian
plagues combined, perhaps eventually
half of the European population, or some-
where around 50–80 million people. Like
prior bacterial plagues, it too was believed
to have spread from the east and entered
Mediterranean ports. It went ballistic in
the heavily populated, fetid, and numer-
ous cities of Europe.
In The Decameron, his brilliant col-
lection of novellas, Boccaccio follows
the same Western tradition of describing
the symptoms, collating the various
religious and superstitious exegeses for
the sudden arrival of mass death, and
for the general breakdown in popular
mores. He too notes that the stricken
public believed they were shortly to per-ish and should therefore satisfy their
appetites in the time they had left.
As I write, there have been only a few
deaths from COVID-19 in the United
States and fewer than 100 known cases.
No child anywhere in the world under ten
is known to have died from the disease.
No matter. We are in the midst of a frenzy
greater even than the 1976 “pandemic”
threat of a new “swine flu” that had sup-
posedly returned in the manner of the
lethal 1918 pandemic.
The panicked U.S. stock market in re -
cent weeks suffered its worst days since
the 9/11 attacks—before rebounding when
profiteers saw the economy stronger
than the virus. The entire economy of
China, ground zero of the pandemic, has
be come calcified, despite suffering
fewer than 70,000 reported cases and
fewer than 3,000 deaths in a population
of 1.4 billion. Hundreds of millions of
Chinese remain in both voluntary and
forced quarantines, amid fuel and food
shortages. As a result, China’s trillion-
dollar supply chains to foreign importers
stagnate. The modern world may be tech-
nologically savvy and medically sophisti-How good economics leads to good policies—and to good results.
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