Disabled by a virus

Abstract

Quoting W.B. Yeats — “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” — is quite common when discussing crises of varying intensities. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, seems to be one crisis where even Yeats‟s words fail to adequately capture its severity. At the time of writing, the number of people infected has increased to more than 735,345, with deaths crossing 34,818. The sharp rise in infections and deaths has caught many governments unprepared. While governments around the world have been criticized for delaying the drastic action needed to combat the spread of the virus, it needs to be recognized that achieving the right balance between citizens‟ need to move freely and imposing restrictions to stop the spread of the virus is difficult. Governments across centuries, from the 14th to the 21st, and of different persuasions, authoritarian and democratic, have faced the same difficult dilemmas. The initial response to the outbreak of the bubonic plague, which killed between 75 and 200 million people in the 14th century, was to isolate those affected and those who came in contact with them. What proved effective in combating the bubonic plague and other pandemics in the long run, however, were vaccines and public health policies designed to improve sanitation