A brief comment on Niall Ferguson’s Doom
From the text, page 11: “We tend to think of epidemics and pandemics narrowly, in terms of particular pathogens’ impacts on human populations. However, it is as much the social networks and state capacities that the pathogen encounters that determine the magnitude of a pandemic’s impact.”
Two thoughts. One is that again I really don’t like the word “pandemic”; I think it is hyperbole when applied to Covid-19, and the resulting government over-reaction affected me personally. The other is that a novel I really liked about this subject was Albert Camus’ The Plague, which deals with the psychological elements of medical scares.