The Soviet Union, for instance, ran a top-secret bioweapons program for decades. Tens of thousands of researchers sought to enhance many different pathogens. They even developed a weaponized strain of the smallpox virus, accepting the likelihood that use in war would also impact the Soviet population. 

A subsequent smallpox outbreak in Aralsk in 1971 triggered an emergency lockdown and vaccination campaign, and was only later linked to an aerosolized smallpox test on an island in the Aral Sea. The Soviets signed the Biological Weapons Convention the following year, but maintained its bioweapons program nevertheless. The smallpox outbreak was concealed for decades. Defectors alleged that the same program sought to engineer bacteria such as plague to resist antibiotics. 

Last week, Russia reportedly quarantined hospitals, dispatched FSB security agents, and deployed personnel in protective suits following the death of a single researcher studying plague at a weapons-lineage Irkutsk laboratory. Given the lab’s protocols and DNA sequencing capabilities available, I would expect Russian authorities to have identified the responsible pathogen, but they have yet to publicly share any relevant information. 

Since Russian plague researchers are routinely vaccinated and would normally be treated with antibiotics following an accident, a researcher dying from natural plague would be extremely unusual. The authorities’ stringent quarantine response, which has continued after they claimed the death was due to a “pneumonia of unknown etiology” rather than natural plague, implies they believe there is a substantial risk of an outbreak of something else.  

This means we are dealing with either inaccurate reporting, major safety failures, an engineered vaccine-evading and pan-resistant plague strain, or a different pathogen entirely. In other words, there is a nontrivial chance that the responsible pathogen might be an engineered biological agent more transmissible than the moderately contagious pneumonic plague. 

What does this mean for the rest of us? Could Western defenses withstand an engineered pandemic agent? Judging from recent meetings of the National Academies, much of the medical and political establishment appears to believe that better vaccines and therapeutics can protect us from engineered pandemics. Unfortunately, defenses that typically work against blind evolution will fail miserably against a competent attacker who can see and design around them. 

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I specialize in biotechnology and ecological engineering: the creation of genes and organisms that can persist or even spread on their own in the wild. I’m keenly aware of the dangers of uncontrolled exponential growth. For this reason, when I invented CRISPR-based gene drive, a way for a single researcher to engineer entire wild populations, I withheld the technology until I could be confident that it favored defense: gene drive is slow, conspicuous, and capable of countering itself. Pandemics need not be slow or conspicuous: they can spread fast like SARS-CoV-2, or stealthily like HIV. A good guy with a pandemic cannot counter a bad guy with a pandemic. 

Imagine that Covid-19 had killed 80% of those infected. Nations would have collapsed long before we had enough vaccines. While many countries now aim to approve new vaccines within 100 days of spotting a novel disease, and the United States hopes to manufacture enough doses for every resident within 130 days, that won’t be enough. To understand why biomedicine will reliably fail against deliberate pandemics, consider a game of darts.

Picture a pub with a back wall covered in dartboards. Imagine that damage to any board corresponds to human casualties, and there are many boards — one for every type of pathogen capable of spreading efficiently in humans. The player represents evolution by natural selection: blind, amoral, and possessed of near-infinite darts — pathogens — but primarily limited to repeating strikes on or near targets it has already hit. 

Covid-19, regardless of its origin, was caused by a stray dart unexpectedly striking a new region of the coronavirus board. Evolution followed by tossing a flurry of darts nearby: first at the same location, representing the ancestral virus spreading across the world, then expanding outwards incrementally with variants — Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron, and so on. As infections accumulated, acquired immunity built up padding around points of impact, reducing the damage from subsequent darts that landed nearby. The Covid vaccines added padding, but had to be constantly updated as the variants moved further away. 

Our vaccine strategy only works because evolution is blind. It generates enormous numbers of constantly mutating darts, but it has no idea how far away it needs to launch them to avoid the padding. This is why vaccination can keep pace against natural threats. Even a rapidly mutating virus — a series of darts moving steadily away from the initial strike — takes months or years to approach the edge of the padding. 

But an intelligent player, sighted, will immediately throw darts outside the padded regions. In our metaphor, a dart’s mutations determine whether it is functional enough to strike the board, and whether it is sufficiently different from earlier darts to land outside of any padding. The most important reason we haven’t yet seen any deliberate pandemics is the lack of known, functional, accessible darts. Even some historically successful darts like the 1918 influenza virus, called the “mother of all pandemics”, would be unlikely to spread today due to population immunity triggered by modern descendant strains. Still, we should not mistake “isn’t widely known” for “doesn’t exist.” And AI is learning. 

Earlier this year, a lab seeking new ways to eliminate antibiotic-resistant bacteria trained an AI model on thousands of genomes of harmless bacteria-infecting viruses called phages, carefully excluding all human-infecting viruses. Sixteen of 300 AI-redesigned darts struck the target: they could infect and kill bacteria. Imagine if the experiment were repeated using a future model trained on human-infecting viruses. Even if almost every design were to fail, it’s easier for a skilled researcher to make a “library” of a thousand distinct pathogen variants in parallel than to make 10 individual variants. 

The core lesson of evolutionary engineering is that there’s no need to know which design will work. Make them all, and let evolution sort it out. Worse, some well-intentioned researchers have built and shared preliminary AI models intended to predict which combinations of mutations in an existing dart would hit the board in an unprotected region; their results have been published in the most prestigious journals. In a world where nature is the only enemy, that’s a great plan: we could improve vaccine designs to absorb more of nature’s subsequent strikes. But it’s a terrible idea if anyone is malicious. While current models probably aren’t accurate enough, sufficiently improved versions would allow a single skilled individual to generate libraries of immune-escaping variants of many human viruses — including those that have been safely controlled by vaccines for decades. 

We might prefer to believe that we live in a world where no one would do such a thing. The evidence suggests otherwise. A key question is whether there is a limited number of possible immune-escaping variants. The answer appears to be no: biological sequence space is unimaginably vast, and experiments have demonstrated that very different sequences can encode the same function. That means there are extraordinarily many different ways to redesign the surface of a pathogen so that it can escape immunity and still cause a pandemic by hitting the board in an undefended location. Most are never explored by evolution, which relies on small mutations, and therefore tends to proceed in steps rather than via huge leaps.

Now combine near-limitless variants with evolutionary engineering. A skilled attacker with a sufficiently predictive AI model — better than any that exists today, but likely to be trained within a few years — could synthesize and throw immune-evasive functional darts faster than we could possibly add padding with vaccines. A reactive vaccine strategy is nearly useless against anyone capable of continually releasing new pandemics. 

But escaping immunity is only part of the danger, for not all darts are created equal. Evolution optimizes for replication rather than harm, yet even it occasionally throws something devastating by accident. The myxoma virus killed over 90% of initially infected rabbits and crashed their populations across multiple continents. Still, it was not designed to cause as much harm as possible.

An intelligent enemy intent on destruction would make the darts explosive. Suppose one were to take a hollow dart and fill it with an explosive that detonates upon impact. If it strikes, the explosion will cause far more damage than any natural dart.  

In my professional judgment, there are many potential explosives available. No such explosive is publicly known to work with any particular dart, and establishing which combinations are effective would pose a grave security risk: once scientists identified a compatible pairing, the resulting weapon would become just as accessible to skilled individuals as the dart alone. 

We can try to prevent misuse by controlling access to anything that could plausibly be turned into a functioning dart, including relatively harmless respiratory pathogens that could be re-surfaced by AI. This wouldn’t stop Russia, but it could seriously impede extremists. Yet most gene synthesis firms, which manufacture bespoke DNA molecules for their customers, do not employ effective screening. My laboratory recently showed that it is possible to legally purchase all of the DNA pieces required to recreate the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, even though it is a “select agent” supposedly under lock and key. Such pieces can now be assembled by anyone with common laboratory skills. 

Software tools capable of detecting attempts to acquire the relevant DNA are freely available, but their use is not legally required in any nation. While some laws have been drafted, they don’t specify that screening must be able to detect AI-assisted acquisition using modern DNA assembly techniques. Until that changes, we won’t be able to control access to the biological materials — the hollow darts and explosives — necessary to create pandemic weapons. 

Absent physical controls, our primary defense is ignorance: we lack publicly credible examples of hollow pandemic-capable darts, let alone explosives to fill them. But I doubt that we scientists will be able to restrain ourselves from investigating alleged hollow darts and explosives and openly publishing our findings. Most of us still assume that all knowledge is worth having and best shared freely. 

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The moment someone publicly identifies a compatible dart and explosive, all those thousands of people with the relevant laboratory skills would likely be able to build a pandemic weapon. Add an AI capable of generating immune-escaping functional variants, and an attacker could produce an arsenal of explosive darts. Even if vaccines could somehow both withstand the detonation and be made much faster than they are today, we would have to keep designing, manufacturing, and distributing new ones as the attacker changed the target area. 

I am deeply alarmed by this trajectory. But I’m also exceedingly biased. I specialize in playing nature’s replication game in unorthodox ways. I’ve evolved molecular tools by harnessing viruses that infect bacteria, invented methods of editing animal populations, and performed the early research into the invasive potential of mirror-image bacteria. I’ve also worked in security, building and testing DNA-synthesis screening systems and “red-teaming” AI models to see how readily they can be used to cause harm. To me, competently designed weapons appear considerably more obvious and easier to build than they actually are. 

But difficulty and obscurity are not reliable defenses. Good security practice assumes that the adversary is more cunning than you, possesses capabilities you have never imagined, and knows of every defense you’ve prepared. They can choose when and where to strike. Given a sufficiently powerful weapon, they need only succeed once. And AI is democratizing competence. 

None of which guarantees catastrophe. What I see as obvious and imminent could take many years, and very few people want to cause widespread destruction. But even a small annual probability adds up. We must prepare, then, for someone to accidentally or deliberately release a competently designed pandemic weapon. If that day comes, it would be profoundly unwise to rely on biomedicine alone.

As a life scientist, it’s painful to admit that my field cannot solve the problem of deliberate pandemics. We can’t rely on developing and distributing a new vaccine or treatment after each attack. Instead, we should avoid becoming infected in the first place. 

Stockpiled protective equipment can filter out viruses and bacteria before they’re inhaled; and they can be killed mid-air by far-UV light (radiation that kills pathogens without harming human tissue) and glycol vapors (a gaseous, odorless component of stage fog). These technologies can suppress airborne pathogens without first needing to recognize them. But they’re neglected by a biomedical establishment intent on fighting the last war. 

The solution is to install germicidal defenses in buildings to fight every kind of respiratory disease. Evolution throws millions of darts each day, causing widespread misery, lost economic productivity, and thousands of deaths. We don’t need to sit here and take it. The more spaces equipped with germicidal defenses to block routine infections and seasonal flu, the fewer our sick days and the lower our medical bills. If recent history and the developing situation in Irkutsk are insufficient to spur action, the ongoing toll of infections and resulting chronic diseases should be reason enough to act. 

Safeguarding civilization begins with fighting the common cold. Let’s screen off the dartboards with germicidal curtains as fast as we can — before an intelligent enemy throws an explosive dart.

What happened next has done little to allay concern.

Reports circulated that Shipilova had contracted pneumonic plague following a lab accident involving a broken test tube. Russian authorities deny this. They say there is no evidence of an accident involving dangerous pathogens and that testing has not established a connection between her illness and her work. Yet around 200 contacts have reportedly been placed under medical observation, parts of the hospital where she was treated were quarantined, and Anna Popova, the head of Russia’s public-health agency Rospotrebnadzor, flew to Siberia for an emergency meeting. One local government official confirmed over the weekend that Shipilova had died from the plague, only to later edit his statement to add the word “possibly”. Meanwhile, the world has seen footage of men in hazmat suits stalking the streets of Irkutsk.

For the moment, there is no sign of a spreading plague outbreak. No further infections have been identified among Shipilova’s contacts, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has assessed the public-health risk as “moderate to low” in Irkutsk, and “low” for the country as a whole, while seeking further information from Moscow.

But there is a more unsettling question lurking behind the headlines. What exactly goes on in a “plague institute” in Siberia? Might the organism involved have been altered in some way? Since Russia inherited part of the Soviet Union’s enormous biological warfare infrastructure, is it conceivable that this was not simply a laboratory accident, but pointed to something much more dangerous?

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So what do we know? It’s important to understand that there is nothing inherently sinister about having an anti-plague institute in Siberia. Plague did not disappear with the Black Death. Yersinia pestis still circulates naturally in populations of rodents and their fleas, including across parts of Russia, Mongolia and Central Asia. While human infections are relatively rare, the Irkutsk institute grew out of this natural prevalence. The regional anti-plague institute for Siberia and the Russian Far East has, for more than a century, monitored dangerous infections, investigated natural disease reservoirs and maintained specialist teams capable of responding to outbreaks of plague, anthrax, cholera and other serious infectious diseases.

In other words, its existence makes epidemiological sense. Nor is it uniquely Russian. Across the world, labs which are capable of working with dangerous pathogens are maintained. They are essential for diagnosing outbreaks, developing vaccines and treatments, and understanding diseases that might threaten us in future.

Russia does, however, have baggage. The Soviet Union secretly operated the largest-known biological weapons programme in history: Biopreparat. Soviet military scientists were working on pathogens which caused anthrax, smallpox and investigating whether they could be turned into effective weapons. Founded in the Twenties, it continued clandestinely even after they had become signatories of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. This history matters because it inevitably colours the interpretation of unexplained incidents at Russian biological facilities. Let’s not forget the smallpox outbreak of 1971.

But here is currently still no evidence that Shipilova encountered an engineered strain of plague; still less that Russia is developing a “pandemic weapon” at the institute. Could Yersinia pestis be used as a biological weapon? Certainly. Its potential has been recognised for decades. Pneumonic plague is particularly frightening because of its historical associations. Infection of the lungs can progress extremely rapidly and can spread between people through respiratory particles. Untreated, it is frequently fatal.

But plague today is not the Black Death. It is a bacterial infection for which effective antibiotics are readily available. If recognised and treated quickly, patients have a good chance of recovery. Public-health authorities also know how to contain it: isolate suspected pneumonic cases, identify and monitor contacts, provide preventive antibiotics where necessary and protect healthcare workers.

This also puts the Russian response into perspective. The extensive quarantine measures have fuelled speculation that the authorities know something they are not saying. Perhaps they do. But the measures themselves are not proof of an engineered pathogen, nor even that Shipilova acquired her infection in the laboratory. If doctors genuinely suspected pneumonic plague in somebody who had already been treated in hospital, isolating contacts and healthcare workers is precisely the precautionary response one would expect.

The more disturbing hypothetical is not that this was ordinary plague, but that it was an engineered form of the pathogen, deliberately altered to make existing defences less effective. Modern biotechnology raises possibilities that 20th-century biological weapons programmes did not possess. Pathogens might, in principle, be altered in ways that change their disease-causing properties or reduce the effectiveness of existing medical countermeasures.

Indeed, one of the great difficulties with biological threats is precisely that the same scientific capabilities can serve very different purposes. Scientists legitimately study how pathogens spread, why some variants cause more severe disease, and whether treatments will remain effective. But the knowledge and techniques needed to defend against biological threats can also potentially be repurposed to deliberately cause harm. The boundary between defensive research and activities that could contribute to weapons development is therefore not always visible simply by looking at the equipment inside a laboratory.

And this problem is becoming more important because the number of labs capable of conducting high-consequence biological research has grown. The Global BioLabs initiative, which I established at King’s College London, has documented a substantial expansion in maximum and high-containment laboratory capacity around the world. There are good reasons for this. Covid taught governments that the ability to detect emerging diseases, characterise pathogens and develop medical countermeasures must be part of national security.

Yet more labs and more work with dangerous pathogens also means more opportunity for something to go wrong. Of course buildings, protective equipment and elaborate operating procedures will reduce risk enormously. But they cannot abolish it. Equipment fails. Samples are mishandled. Procedures are breached. Humans tire. Researchers can be infected without immediately recognising their exposure.

We know this because it has happened before. After the 2003-SARS epidemic had been brought under control, laboratory-acquired infections subsequently occurred in Singapore, Taiwan and Beijing. In Beijing, one such infection led to further transmission outside the laboratory. But, accidents are not proof that dangerous-pathogen research should stop; they are proof that humans work in laboratories.

Covid should have forced us to confront the second half of this problem: not merely how to prevent lab accidents, but how to establish whether one has taken place.

Within weeks of Covid reaching Europe, when discussion of the origin of the enfolding pandemic was already becoming politically toxic, I argued that a credible investigation was needed to examine all plausible routes of emergence. Evidence of SARS-CoV-2‘s evolutionary history could not, by itself, establish how it first entered the human population. A naturally occurring virus could pass directly from animals to people. It could also, in principle, infect somebody collecting animals or samples in the field, or someone subsequently working with them.

Instead, the Covid origins question became trapped in geopolitics. On one side, to raise the possibility of a research-related accident came to be treated as equivalent to promoting a conspiracy theory. On the other, the absence of transparency was taken as proof that a lab leak had occurred. Intelligence agencies were asked to resolve questions that would require scientific, epidemiological and forensic investigation. Years later, we still lack a definitive explanation that commands broad international confidence. That failure is directly relevant to Irkutsk.

Traditional outbreak investigations start with straightforward questions. Who became ill? When? Where? What did they have in common? What were their likely exposures?

But when a plausible connection to a laboratory emerges, investigators need to be able to ask another set of questions. What pathogens were being held there? Which strains? What work was being conducted? Who handled them? Were any incidents recorded? Did staff report unusual illnesses? What do clinical samples, sequencing data, laboratory records and occupational-health records show?

The purpose of such an investigation is not to prove that a lab caused an outbreak. It is to provide a credible way of determining whether it did or didn’t. That capability remains surprisingly weak internationally. WHO can investigate disease outbreaks and request information, but it cannot compel a sovereign government to provide unfettered access to outsiders. Other international protocols, including the Biological Weapons Convention and the UN Secretary General’s mechanism for investigating allegations of biological-weapons, are primarily concerned with suspected use of deliberately engineered pathogens. But they were not designed as routine forensic systems to answer a more basic question: did an outbreak occur naturally, or was it the result of a laboratory accident?

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This creates a dangerous vacuum. We do not know whether Shipilova died from plague. We do not know whether she was exposed to anything at the Irkutsk institute. There is no proof that the pathogen involved was engineered, nor that this episode reveals a Russian pandemic-weapons programme. But nor should the world have to choose between taking Moscow’s assurances on trust and imagining the most frightening alternative.

What is needed now, then, is quite mundane: a clear diagnosis; an account of what Shipilova was working on; confirmation of whether a lab incident occurred; the results of testing and sequencing; and, ideally, sufficient independent scrutiny to make those findings credible. Essentially, we need informed transparency.

The gap between what is known and what is imaginable is where speculation flourishes. Covid demonstrated just how politically destructive that gap can become. The lesson from Irkutsk is, therefore, not that every unexplained illness in a biological researcher should be treated as evidence of a lab leak — still less a bioweapon. It is that, six years after Covid began, we still lack an international system capable of showing convincingly when one is not.

Back in August 1592 plague had broken out in London and, fearing that plays might be super-spreader events, the city closed its playhouses, keeping them shut for two years.  It was not the first time: thirty years earlier, in 1564, the Lord Mayor had worried that “the great and frequent confluences, congregations and assemblies of great numbers and multitudes of people pressed together in small rooms” was a key factor in the spread of disease. The Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, wrote the same year that “there is no one thing” that “is more like to have renewed this contagion than the practice of an idle sort of people, common players, who now daily set up bills [adverts for performances], whereunto the youth resorteth excessively and there taketh infection”. As we all know, the authorities like to blame the young for spreading illness.

In times of disease, performances were often cancelled. “For the avoiding of Infection”, the Lord Mayor wrote in 1569, “all great resort, assembly, and concourse of people assembled and drawn together by reason of any plays, interludes or other shows should be forbidden”. Serious breakouts of plague, lasting several months, swept through London every few years between 1570 and 1583. But the theatre was never completely closed. By the end of this period, the Lord Mayor was writing, “one very great and dangerous inconvenience” was “the assembly of people to plays, to which do resort great multitudes of the basest sort of people, and many infected with sores running on them, which be otherwise perilous for contagion”.

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For almost ten years after 1583, plague outbreaks had been more manageable. The 1592-94 pestilence was therefore a shock both in its suddenness and in its duration, and theatre people were of course not immune. Margaret Brayne was amongst those who died in this vicious resurgence of the disease — a woman who had helped to finance, build and run at least one of the earliest London playhouses, the Theatre. She may also have helped her husband John to build the oldest Elizabethan playhouse that we know of, the Red Lion, the pair helping to invent theatre as an architectural space.

But plague presented opportunities for those willing and able to pursue them. These were the years that Simon Forman started to build a public reputation by working as both doctor and magician in plague-stricken London districts. Through these early years of fame, Forman established a distinctively early modern reputation that spanned medicine, psychology, astrology and necromancy. He would later become much consulted by ordinary and famous Londoners, becoming an early modern celebrity.

Likewise, other professionals used this year as an opportunity to grow their profiles. The book publisher Joan Broome printed a play in 1592 and explained to her readers in a preface that “Since the plays in Paul’s were dissolved, there are certain comedies come to my hands by change”. In other words: the playhouse on London’s St Paul’s Cathedral site has now been closed, and I am therefore publishing some of its plays. Here a professional woman responds to closure by treating it as a business opportunity. Play publication increased widely in these years, and is a key reason why these texts survive today: in some ways we have plague, and the consequent theatre closures, to thank for the development and our knowledge of the period’s drama. And though we don’t know when Shakespeare’s writing career began, these were the years in which that writing started to make itself known, both onstage and in print.

But other Londoners found themselves utterly without work — and there was no furlough scheme in the 16th century. In 1593 the London watermen, who made money ferrying people across the Thames, petitioned the government for the reopening of the Rose playhouse in Southwark. These men depended on the audiences for much of their income: a reminder that it is not just the hospitality and entertainment industries that suffer at a time like this, but all those who enable the public to get out and about.

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It’s worth remembering, here, that early modern playhouses were the product of an enormous rupture in society: the English Reformation. As Catholicism was cancelled, its religious spaces were confiscated by the state. Many of them became stages for a new kind of English theatre. The Theatre and the Curtain, for instance, were both built outside the London city walls in Shoreditch on former monastery land; in the city itself there was Blackfriars, whose name records the Dominican Order who used the venue before the Reformation. Closures, cancellation and societal shifts laid the groundwork for a dramatic revolution.

And in many ways early modern theatre companies were much better placed to respond to challenges than today’s. They were lighter on their feet, always touring, and in their early years only rarely took up a long-term residency in particular playing venues. This gave them enormous flexibility and meant that when a particular part of London or the country was affected by plague, the company could just go somewhere else.

Moreover, early modern performance took place outdoors. Even the large amphitheatre spaces, of which London’s modern Globe is a replica, did not have roofs, and though theatre historians have often explained this in terms of the natural lighting it provides — which allowed companies to avoid the expense of candles — this is also a very sensible ventilation system in a time of plague. We generally think of modern theatre as happening in buildings, but perhaps we need to embrace the rich tradition of outdoor performance as we explore theatre under Covid.

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Early modern actors also had a rehearsal and performance schedule that would make most modern practitioners panic. Whereas today’s theatres often stage a single play for months at a time, early modern theatre companies constantly rotated their offering, sometimes putting on as many as ten different plays in a single fortnight. They were able to do this because they thought of both rehearsal and performance in terms very different from the dominant model in contemporary Anglo-American theatre today. Rehearsals were often about agreeing who would be onstage when, where people would stand, leaving the finer details — often considered to be the very stuff of rehearsal nowadays — to be worked out during the show itself. This means that early modern drama was much more amenable to improvisation and much less centred on text than the theatre we know.

One of the reasons that theatres will find it difficult to reopen under Covid is that rehearsal periods take place across several weeks, requiring a company to finance periods of rehearsal for a show that may never get to open. The planning time is itself now the problem; taking inspiration from the early modern precedent may be a way out of this impasse. Outdoor playing, innovation and more improvisation would make public entertainment more viable as we enter our second year of living with Covid. Fluidity and change have always been core parts of theatre’s business model. After all, the industry took shape at a time of plague.

This, however, does not conclusively prove that the plague recorded in other Near Eastern kingdoms had indeed reached Egypt. It may have been a metaphor. Even if the “disease” mentioned on the stela had manifested itself as the plague sweeping the Nile Valley, it was dreaded above all as a cosmic malignancy: one that had infected the dimension of the supernatural. The stela listed the symptoms. Temples stood desolate. Crumbling shrines were piled with rubbish. Thistles sprouted in the sanctuaries of the gods. “It was as if they had never been.”

What had prompted this great convulsion of iconoclasm? Only a pharaoh could possibly have commanded a people as respectful of their venerable traditions as the Egyptians to tolerate such a disorienting, such a revolutionary, such an unspeakably blasphemous programme.

Two decades before the eight-year-old Tutankhamun came to the throne, another, infinitely more domineering king had ascended to the rule of Egypt. Everything that Amenhotep IV did might have been calculated to shock and bewilder his subjects.

Amun-Re, the great god whose sprawling temple at Karnak was only one of a multitude of such complexes across Egypt, had been decisively repudiated. The king himself, to signal this as directly as he could, had changed his name from Amenhotep — “Amun is pleased” — to a new one: Akhenaten. “Effective for the Aten”, it meant: the expression of a radical new theology. The Aten, the sun disk, was, by Egyptian standards, a chillingly impersonal god. There was barely a hint of the anthropomorphic about it. In friezes, it was portrayed simply as an orb. It resembled nothing of the mingled human and animal forms that were characteristic of other Egyptian gods. Its rays, when they fell on Akhenaten or his queen, Nefertiti, were shown with open hands; but such a blessing was for the royal couple, and the royal couple alone. No one else served the Aten as its intermediaries to mankind.

“Sole god, without another beside him.” Akhenaten’s proclamation of monotheism, in a realm as crowded by gods as Egypt, struck at the very heart of how his subjects understood both the universe and themselves. No longer was the sun portrayed as descending at dusk into the realm of the dead, there to bring life to the departed. The cosmos, in Akhenaten’s imagining of it, was purged of all mythology. Knowledge of the divine was rendered a prerogative of the king alone. The festivals that had structured the rhythms of life in Egypt for centuries; the comfort of knowing that a great multitude of gods existed, familiar and much-loved; and the reassurance that in death these same gods might come to be seen, and eternal life be had, and everything serve as one perpetual festival — all that was swept away. It was Egypt’s — and the world’s — first experience of revolution.

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An experience that the Egyptians came decisively to reject. This was what the stela raised at Karnak in the first year of Tutankhamun’s reign served to proclaim. The boy-pharaoh himself, almost certainly Akhenten’s son, had spent his early years as Tutankhaten: “the Living Image of the Aten”. Now, as Tutankhamun, “the Living Image of Amun”, his role was as the figure-head of a counter-revolution. The worship of the Aten was abandoned. Akhenaten’s legacy was targeted for systematic desecration. The traditional priesthoods had their temples and their authority restored.

Tutankhamun’s early death only quickened the pace of the repudiation by the Egyptian elites of the pharaoh who had come to be known by them simply as “the Criminal”. It was the army, in the form of a general by the name of Horemheb, who consigned his revolution definitively to the grave. A damnatio memoriae was proclaimed not only against Akhenaten but against Tutankhamun as well. The reign of the boy-pharaoh had been defined by opposition to that of his predecessor, and so he too was condemned to oblivion.

Both had all traces of their existence wiped clean. Their presence on the king lists was removed. Their cartouches were chiselled out. They began to slip from memory. As the centuries slipped by, so demolished statues of Akhenaten lay buried and forgotten beneath temples raised at Karnak to the greater glory of Amun. Across the Nile, the robbers who preyed on the royal tombs that pockmarked the Valley of the Kings never thought to look for the treasure that had been buried with Tutankhamun — for they had never heard of such a pharaoh. It was as though the entire traumatic episode of Akhenaten’s revolution had never been.

Or was it? A millennium and more after the death of Akhenaten, Egypt came under the rule of foreign kings, Greeks from Macedonia. In the reign of one of these kings, Ptolemy II, or perhaps Ptolemy III, an Egyptian priest named Manetho wrote a history in Greek of his native land. Naturally, he did not include Akhenaten in his long list of the pharaohs who had ruled over Egypt; yet Akhenaten’s ghost, even so, may not have been entirely absent from his chronicle.

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Such, at any rate, is the implication of a strange story told by Manetho about a pharaoh called Amenhotep — a king who, supposedly, had driven all the lepers in Egypt out into the desert. There the lepers had taken as their leader a priest of the sun. This priest, Osarsiph, had made laws for them that reversed all the laws that Egyptians, from time immemorial, had taken for granted. No longer were the gods to be worshipped, their temples cherished, their sacred animals allowed to live. Everything was to be turned on its head. The lepers, under the leadership of Osarsiph, ended up seizing control of Egypt. Amenhotep fled to Ethiopia as an exile. Osarsiph’s rule saw sanctuaries ritually desecrated, the images of the gods mutilated, and sacred animals roasted on spits. Only after 13 years of such blasphemies was Amenhotep finally able to return, and redeem his kingdom. The lepers were driven out into the desert, never to return. With them went Osarsiph — a man who by this point, so Manetho noted, “had changed his name, and come to be known as Moses”.

Such was the origin of a tradition that, elaborated by a succession of Greek and Roman writers, came to cast the biblical story of Exodus as a narrative marked both by disease and by the scandalous inversion of every norm. Moses, wrote Tacitus in the early 2nd century AD, had instituted “novel rites which were the exact opposite of those practised by other mortals everywhere”. This re-telling of Exodus — one that had a profound influence on Roman attitudes to the Jews — was a mirror held up to the portrayal in the Bible of the gods and customs of Egypt. “Both accounts,” as Jan Assmann, in his book Moses the Egyptian, puts it,

“are suffused with mutual hatred and abomination… In the Biblical version, the Egyptians are shown as torturers and oppressors, idolators and magicians. In the Egyptian version, the ‘Jews’ are shown as lepers, as impure people, atheists, misanthropes, iconoclasts, vandals, and sacrilegious criminals.”

What they bear witness to, so Assmann brilliantly argues, is not a historical Exodus, but rather the role played by Akhenaten’s revolution in the collective memory of the Egyptians as a a buried neurosis, the enduring scar-tissue of an otherwise forgotten trauma.

Well might Freud have been fascinated by the heretic pharaoh. The rediscovery of Akhenaten by archaeologists, and the possible clues that the cult of the Aten might provide to the origins of Jewish identity, were themes that he started turning over in his mind in 1912, at least. His last work, completed in 1939, even as Hitler was preparing for war and Freud himself was preparing for death, cast Moses as a follower of Akhenaten: a priest who, after the failure of the pharaoh’s revolution, had led a band of “wild Semites” out into the desert, there to try and school them in the worship of the Aten.

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The attempt, so Freud hypothesised, had failed. Moses’ followers, weary of the demands he was placing on them, had killed him. In place of the Aten, they had fallen instead to worshipping a volcano-god called Yahweh. Even so, they could not entirely suppress the guilt they felt at having murdered the father-figure who had led them out of Egypt. Over the course of the centuries, this guilt had served to forge out of the Aten and Yahweh, the sun disk and the volcano-god, a composite deity. Repression of the memory of this process had served to disguise from the Jews the true origins of their monotheism. It had derived, wrote the dying Freud, not from Sinai but from Egypt. “When Moses brought to his people the conception of a single god, it was nothing new.”

No one today takes the precise details of Freud’s theory seriously. Yet in this year of all years, as we prepare to emerge from the pandemic, and snatch after the prospect of normality, it is possible that the story of Akhenaten does indeed provide a warning. So traumatic had his revolution been to the Egyptians that it had seemed to them a leprosy, a corruption of the body, a plague. The memory of Akhenaten’s iconoclasm, it appears, took a lot longer to fade in Egypt than the memory of Akhenaten himself. A millennium after his death, it was still able to express itself in the form of the narrative that Manetho would go on to record in his history. Freud, at any rate, would not have been surprised. A pandemic, like a revolution, is a trauma that cannot readily be forgotten. At best, it can only be repressed.

Lockdown has disorientated everyone’s social life, with the indefinite suspension of the night-time economy — pubs, bars, nightclubs, restaurants, theatres and music venues. Of course, some pleasure-seeking inevitably has to be sacrificed temporarily for the sake of arresting the spread of the virus and protecting those most vulnerable. But the sacrifice has hit singletons and voluptuaries particularly hard.

The last year has been a puritan’s wet dream: social distancing has devastated all the industries that facilitate casual sex; some countries have imposed alcohol restrictions; the film industry even consulting the old priggish Hays Code for filming intimate scenes; universities restricting parties and hooking up on campus in the interest of public health. And now a third lockdown has once again cancelled all opportunities for us to go out and enjoy ourselves.

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Worse, it’s felt as if the risk of spreading the virus has been exploited to bolster an old prejudice: that spending time in these places is inherently immoral. The stench of puritanism, which H.L Mencken summarised as “the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy”, has risen to the surface to pollute the nostrils of society. Official Western morality — whether represented by Plato, Christianity or Kant — has always regarded hedonism as fundamentally bad. The new Puritans, like the old ones, like to police the way other people get their pleasure.

You don’t need to have broken any rule to earn their ire: to even complain about what it feels like not being able to date or party, or even socialise with friends over a drink, is regarded as inappropriate, dismissed as inconsequential, in comparison to the noble goal of saving lives.

And so no one protests that the lifestyles of the lustful, the promiscuous, the sluts and fuckbois (“libertine men and scarlet women” as The Music Man refers to them) have been turned upside down. Some hopeful young romantics gave e-dating a go; others tried out “Zoom nightclubs”. The use of online porn has increased and OnlyFans has risen meteorically. But the pleasures of the flesh have been out of bounds.

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Even though I knew this state was temporary, in the early days of lockdown an irrational, paranoid voice inside me did entertain fears that the so called “new normal” would irrevocably abolish these pleasures. In stark contrast, the neo-puritans celebrated the current chaste state of affairs — even calling for it to continue. They imagine Covid-19 to be the nail in the coffin for the “soul-eroding” hook-up culture; they reminded us that there are dangerous “consequences” to casual sex again.

Thank science for the vaccine then. Not only is it a testament to human endeavour,  it is also a precious golden ticket to the return of a varied and exciting social life. Some predict, or rather salivate over, an explosion of decadence and debauchery — a “roaring twenties” of the 21st century. Epidemiologist Dr Nicholas Christakis certainly thinks such an era is on its way, arguing in his recent book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, that the rest of the 2020s will be defined by “sexual licentiousness” as people will be “relentlessly seeking social interaction”.

During the peaks of pandemics, he argues, people tend to be more risk-averse, frugal, abstemious and socially reserved. Afterwards, all of these trends reverse, and people spend and socialise more liberally than ever before. The most obvious comparison, of course, is the Jazz Age following the Spanish Flu and the First World War that witnessed “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. The era was made legendary by the Flappers and Greenwich Village; it developed new social and cultural freedoms, especially for women, who turned against stifling domesticity (as so many of us now long to.)

During the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 14th century, the belief that the end of the world was near was so popular that survivors became wildly hedonistic, organising lavish parties and feasts in ale houses, simply to celebrate the fact that they were alive amidst the spectre of death and misery all around them. “They spent day and night moving from one tavern to the next, drinking without mode or measure…engaging only in those activities that gave them pleasure”, observed the contemporary writer Boccaccio on the excesses of the era.

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There are even accounts of survivors going to their local graveyard for a quick shag before repenting in church to laugh in the face of death, which later led to the Papal office threatening fines and excommunication. Moreover, the plague saw the de facto institutionalisation of prostitution, with brothels providing a new source of income for the authorities and arguably ensuring social stability by serving as an outlet for riotous lower class men, especially in areas where they outnumbered young women.

In the 1980s the HIV/AIDS epidemic was supposed to have been the end of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. It was viewed by religious fundamentalists as cosmic karma for the promiscuity of gay men. The epidemic contributed to the demise of the gay-centred bathhouse culture and shifted campaigners’ focus from sexual liberation to gay marriage. The porn theatres that were once a hallmark in Time Square, New York were gentrified in favour of “family values and safety”.

Still, the HIV/AIDs epidemic was succeeded by the sex positivity of the 1990s, during which the West was drunk on the rather shallow liberal optimism of the ‘end of history’ following the end of the Cold War. That era saw the Spice Girls, the golden age of lads mags and the rise of queer culture, kink/BDSM and Tantric sex in mainstream pop culture — and their steady integration into the consumer economy.

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A pattern is apparent: human beings are pleasure seeking-creatures. After a period of retrenchment, sacrifice and austerity, an orgy of decadence and debauchery isn’t too far away. All that pent-up energy and desire just waits to express itself. Why? Because it feels good. Don’t underestimate the sheer endurance of the human libido, and the lengths we will go to, even in unbearable situations, to satisfy it.

For the neo-puritans who are surreptitiously giddy that Covid-19 will somehow put an end to casual sex and hook-up culture in favour of marriage or at least long term “emotionally committed” relationships: if even HIV/AIDS couldn’t do it, then Covid-19 sure as hell can’t. Humans have always hooked up despite what traditional morality said — and will continue to do so. Once this third — and we can only hope final — lockdown comes to an end, lust will be in the air.

One key motif of modern politics in the past decade has been the recurrence of the antinomy between individualism and communitarianism. This has especially been the case in the Covid-19 pandemic, during which activities like partying have been condemned as individualist selfishness in contrast to our communal obligations to “protect our NHS”. It is important to stress, nevertheless, that hedonistic proclivities aren’t simply about satiating individual desires, but about forming bonds, connection, even intimacy with others.

The “anarchy of the flesh” is an essential part of social life: we drink, eat, party, dance and screw with other people. There is a particular intimacy that one can experience on a dancefloor or in a concert that can evolve into a transcendent experience. This is something to be valued and cherished as part of the human experience — and something to invest and indulge in, when the pandemic is in the past.

The morning after the bombing of the Grand Brighton Hotel, she took to the stage of the Tory Party conference breathing a message of pure defiance. “The fact that we are gathered here now — shocked, but composed and determined — is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.” Indeed, her only concession to the attempted assassination of the cabinet a few hours previously was to omit from her conference speech a planned condemnation of large swathes of the Labour Party as the enemy within. Otherwise, the lady was very much not for turning.

A virus, however, is an altogether subtler and more insidious foe than a terrorist organisation. Covid-19 brings no demands, no ultimatums.

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Plague and the comforts of history

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Boris Johnson, lying in intensive care three weeks ago and feeling the spider touch of the virus darkening and tightening through his body, would have experienced in the most personal and abject manner possible the threat that it presents to the body politic. Its workings are mysterious. There is still no clear picture of how it speads. Even in countries that cannot be accused of fiddling their figures there remains no certainty as to how many people are dying of it, let alone how many have contracted it. To fashion a policy to combat the virus, then, is not simply a matter of following ‘the science’. Even the world’s most brilliant epidemiologists know themselves to be groping after solutions in fog. There is no self-evident path to defeating SARS-Cov-2.

Which said, it is hard to believe that the Prime Minister, during the fortnight he has spent at Chequers recuperating from his brush with death, will not have been reflecting on whether, in the weeks before he was rushed to St Thomas’, he might possibly have done things differently.

The Government’s campaign against Covid-19 has not, it is fair to say, developed necessarily to Britain’s advantage. Far more people, relative to the size of the population, have died in this country than in Germany, let alone than in poorer countries such as Slovakia or Greece. Johnson’s initial attempt to square the competing demands of public health and the economy seems to have ended up inflicting avoidable damage on both. The gung-ho swagger that helped him to win the Brexit referendum and the last election proved altogether less successful against Covid-19. Today, as he returns to Downing Street, his own lungs bear the scars that prove it.

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“Back to his normal, ebullient self.” So Matt Hancock described the Prime Minister on Friday. This may be true — and yet there were hints in the speech that he gave after being discharged from hospital that his personal experience of Covid-19 has served to recalibrate his take both on the virus and on those who are daily risking their own lives to fight it. His salute to healthcare workers seemed rawer, more personal, more emotional than his tributes to them had been before he went into intensive care. “It is thanks to that courage, that devotion, that duty and that love that our NHS has been unbeatable.”

Prior to falling sick, the only ideal that ever seemed to stir Johnson to matching flourishes of emotion was what he has always lauded as Britain’s “ancient and basic freedoms” — but this morning, standing outside No 10 on his return to Downing Street, he insisted once again that these had to remain prorogued, that the need to save the NHS from being overwhelmed had to come first. Before he fell ill, he had spoken in martial terms of sending coronavirus packing, as though it might have been General Galtieri or Jeremy Corbyn. Now he speaks of a victory that will be won by the NHS’s power of love.

Whether language like this will pacify the growing number of Tory MPs fretting that the economy as well as civil liberties are being sacrificed on the altar of saving lives the next few weeks will tell. So also will they be the test of just how far Johnson himself is prepared to go in maintaining the lockdown. History does not suggest that catching and surviving a disease during a time of pandemic necessarily precipitates any great process of conversion among political leaders. Instead, from the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who in 542 almost died of the plague to which he would give his name, to David Lloyd-George, who in the final month of the First World War went down with the Spanish Flu, and only just survived it, most seem to have carried on in much as they had ever done.

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The celebrated example of a leader supposedly undergoing a dramatic change of character after an illness — one of which the classically educated Prime Minister will be more than aware — is not a model that he will be looking to emulate. In AD 37, a few months after becoming emperor, Gaius Caesar — ‘Caligula’ — fell dangerously ill. The Roman people, distraught at the prospect of losing their young and charismatic ruler, were thrown into paroxysms of anxiety. One of them, a wealthy businessman named Atanius Secundus, swore a particularly extravagant oath. Only restore Caligula to health, he promised the gods, and he would fight as a gladiator.

Naturally, he had not expected to be taken up on this vow. His aim had been merely to stand out from the other sycophants. Once back up on his feet, however, the Emperor took Atanius at his word. With a perfectly straight fact, Caligula ordered the wretched flatterer into the arena, there to fight for the amusement of the crowds. Predictably enough, paired against a trained killer, Atanius did not last long. The spectacle of his body being dragged away across the sands of the arena on a hook served notice to the Roman people that their young emperor had risen from his sickbed a dramatically altered person: no longer a man but a monster.

Such, at any rate, was the story. In truth, like so much told about Caligula, it was a myth. Almost certainly, the emperor was no more a lunatic after his illness than he had been before, and the readiness of the Romans to believe it reflected a more general understanding of disease as one of the many expressions of a capricious and repeatedly brutal cosmos. This might express itself in a variety of ways: as a feeling of impotence before “Fortune’s rapid wheel, which is always interchanging adversity and prosperity” or, in its more sophisticated form, as a philosophy of retreat before the world, an insistence that the only true wisdom is to ignore the sufferings of others, to immure oneself within a pleasant garden, and to cultivate ataraxia, the absence of worry.

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There was no place, in this understanding of the universe, for the kind of sickbed conversion that would become such a staple of Christian hagiography: the knight so mortified by an attack of acne that he gave away all his possessions; the invalided merchant’s son who was brought to devote his life to the sick. Certainly, there was no place in the world of classical antiquity for any conception of a national health service — let alone one powered by love.

“Salus populi suprema lex esto,” the Prime Minister is supposed to have declared at a summit of ministers and health officials on Friday — and then, for the benefit of those in attendance not familiar with Cicero, to have offered his own translation: “the health of the people should be the supreme law”. In fact, as Johnson would well have known, the Latin word ‘salus,’ which he translated as ‘health’, had a much broader range of meanings: ‘safety’, ‘welfare’, ‘soundness’.

Here, then, it may be, is as clear an indication of the Prime Minister’s new state of mind as we are likely to get: one in which admiration for the martial values of classical antiquity, rather than being subordinated to a new found passion for the NHS, has instead been seamlessly fused with it. What is the Latin for “Having one’s cake and eating it?”

I will do what I swore I would only do again if civilization were actually coming to an end, because it very possibly is — which is an excellent excuse. I will re-activate my subscription to World of Warcraft. And I will ride forth once more on my creaky mechanical ostrich to do battle with dragons and ogres in the magical realm of Azeroth. I urge you, friends, to join me.

World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG. It takes place in a vast sub-Tolkien fantasy world of mages and warlocks, elves and rogues and warriors. It has its own market economy, and its own ecosystem of professions and careers. It has vast landscapes to explore — some of them very beautiful in a 1970s album-cover way — and enormous numbers of quests to fulfil and missions to run.

You start out as weak as a kitten, and as you “level up” by running errands, killing monsters, practising skills and collecting treasure, you grow in strength. It is fiendishly well calibrated to keep you playing. It’s wicked fun. Like bingeing on chocolate or cocaine: you know you’ll regret it but you can’t resist that tiny bit more. I know so many people who couldn’t bear to look at their “/played” number: the in-game log that tells you to the second how long you’ve spent in the game.

Every time you think you might just log off now and, I don’t know, go to bed or make some food or go out to the pub to meet flesh-and-blood human beings, you’ll catch sight of a non-player character flashing with the little yellow exclamation mark that indicates they have a quest for you. Or you’ll think: I’d best just go to the Auction House to flog what I don’t want from my latest haul of booty. Or you’ll think, gosh, if I just dig up another ten bars of platinum in this quarry I’ll have what I need to craft that nifty pair of gauntlets I’ve been craving. So on, for another ten minutes, you go… and another ten.. and another ten….

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And, happily, no death in Azeroth is forever. Every time a monster kills you, your ghost pops up in a nearby graveyard and you can hasten, incorporeally, back to your downed body to resurrect yourself. You can try that battle again, resume that quest, pick up where you left off. You’re always going forward, however slowly. It’s comforting in that way. It’s comforting in all sorts of ways.

MMORPGs are just what you thirst for in a global lockdown: they are a way of being less alone when you’re alone. Man, do I know this. I was addicted — I think it’s not too strong a word — to World of Warcraft back in the noughties, and I was kinda sad at the time. I was drinking too much and smoking too much and doing too many drugs. I still feel an almost physical queasiness remembering the comedown ends of my vampiric weeknight WoW sessions: a vermilion sun setting on another day in the supersaturated landscape of Azeroth, even as the real-world dawn greyed in the window of my south London flat.

Escapism? You bet. And yet it wasn’t just a retreat from reality. In the game I was able to connect with dear friends whom I seldom if ever saw in real life. One was in rural France. Another pair in California. I missed them, and my connection with them, and we met almost never in meatspace. And yet I spent more time with them online than I did with members of my close family in real life. We logged on and sought each-other out and talked through the in-game chat function. We were close. I felt bad about my addiction to WoW, but it also helped get me through.

It’s an addiction that I overcame. I can’t remember when I logged off for the last time and deleted my account. I can’t even remember why. I suspect it was something to do with getting a wife and children and finding the outside world a bit more tolerable than, for a while, I had. But delete it I did, and I haven’t gone back. And when I do, I wonder if it will feel like time-travelling back to rediscover myself in my early 30s.

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The relationship of WoW to human time is in any case somewhat strange. Even when you are logged off, Azeroth’s world continues to turn: sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, at the same rate as the world turns here. According to some calculations, the game’s 11 million-odd players have logged something like 6 million years of in-game experience between them. That is as long as it took us to evolve from our first upright ancestor to the humans we now recognise — humans who have invented fiat money, and air travel, and advanced medicine, and all those other things whose futures are now looking kinda shaky.

And it bears mentioning that World of Warcraft even has form when it comes to pandemic infectious disease. In September 2005, Blizzard (the company that owns and runs WoW) rolled out a new “raid” for high-level characters. A raid is an example of an “instance”, a stand-alone section of the game (a dungeon or a citadel or similar) designed for large groups of players to team up to defeat.

The final boss in this instance was a bad-tempered chap called Hakkar The Soulflayer. They rather go in for nominative determinism in WoW. It was distinctly possible to tell the difference between old Hakkar and a ray of sunshine; and when he was really pissed off, Hakkar would cast a spell called “Corrupted Blood”, which afflicted all players nearby with a “debuff”, draining them rapidly of health and making them prone to affect other players nearby with the same disease.

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Now here’s the thing. “Corrupted Blood” was never supposed to leave the instance. It was supposed to be specific to the final battle in the infernal dungeon of Zul’Gurub (or as we might now think of it, Azeroth’s Wuhan). But an oversight by programmers (characters’ pets could get infected, and if you stowed your infected pet in its virtual carry-case and left the instance the plague came with you) meant that very soon Corrupted Blood was all over Azeroth like a madwoman’s shit.

Lower-level characters who caught it dropped dead more or less on the spot (standing in, here, for the vulnerable elderly or those with comorbidities). Non player characters couldn’t die of it, but could be infected and pass it on (these became, if you like, the asymptomatic carriers). The cities emptied. Healers did what they could. The terroristically minded spread it for lols.

Various forms of quarantine were tried — and failed. Only when Blizzard reset the servers and patched the game was the outbreak eliminated. Academic epidemiologists — no word of a lie — subsequently made earnest studies of what the Corrupted Blood incident could tell us about real-world pandemics, and published their findings in learned journals worldwide. And now here we are: Corrupted Blood 2.0 is out in a world where death is permanent and nobody yet dares even to imagine what resetting the servers would look like. Hell with this. I’m going to wait it out in Azeroth.

By the year 1348, the city’s Italians had been well-established for half a century, having been admitted by Edward I as representatives of the great banking houses of Florence. French and English kings relied on loans from the Bardi and Peruzzi to fund their extravagant wars and these ‘Lombards’, as they were referred to, gave their name to London’s main financial thoroughfare.

As the year went on, dark stories of contagion grew more common and more terrifying: it was heard that Marseilles and then Paris were overrun by the deadly disease. There was no doubt that London’s time would come, and so on June 23, Saint John’s Eve — a traditional midsummer festival where young women might flirt and dance with men before settling down to a backbreaking life of repeated, dangerous pregnancies — a ship turned up in Melcombe in Dorset, most likely from Bordeaux or possibly Calais. On board were rats infected with Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague-carrying bacterium. By the time the illness had burned out, between a third and half of England’s people were dead.

There had never been a terror like it, and the “Great Mortality” as it was known — and much later, the “Black Death” — has seared itself in the European imagination. It changed the culture and tested the institutions of the time, and as we anxiously await the arrival of another — thankfully far less deadly — contagion from Italy its legacy and impact are worth remembering.

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Epidemics have been around as long as civilization. Plaga — from the Greek for ‘strike’ or ‘hit’ — devastated classical Athens in the 5^th century BC, when the historian Thucydides nursed sufferers; the Antonine Plague — probably smallpox or measles — killed as many as five million Romans at the empire’s peak. Far more deadly was the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century, which had a toll of 25 million and emptied whole regions of the eastern (Byzantine) Empire. Only in the 21^st century did researchers confirm that this was the same illness that would appear eight centuries later — the Bubonic Plague.

Empires were particularly affected by these horrific epidemics, because empires are a form of globalisation — bringing different people into contact with each other and, more dangerously, into contact with other mammals, who act as disease vectors.

Another danger is climate change, which might turn a mild virus into a deadly one, or cause disease-carrying animals to migrate. This is what happened during the 14^th century when the northern hemisphere became considerably cooler, soon after the Mongols had created the largest contiguous empire in history.

Genghis Khan’s people have generally received a historical bad press — people are more likely to recall the pyramid of skulls and the Tigris flowing black and red — yet their rule had opened up trade routes, allowing goods and people to cross Asia. Whether brought at the point of a sword or a trade deal, globalisation always brings the new: new cultures, new ideas, new languages and new pathogens.

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Yersinia pestis had been living on gerbils and other rodents in central Asia, but unstable climate conditions in 1330s caused the disease to jump onto the rat flea. It was killing people by 1339, and in the mid-1340s Christians first heard of a disease raging in the Islamic world, which some at least took as divine punishment for the crusades.

After two centuries of Holy War this was understandable, yet hatred was not universal and during these conflicts Italian merchants had continually done business with Muslims, much to the Church’s fury. Now this trade, once the source of prosperity and peace, proved deadly: plague reached Europe via the Genovese colony of Caffa on the Black Sea (now Feodosiya, in the Ukraine). In October 1347, four ships escaping the diseased city had turned up in Sicily, condemning Italy to its fate.

The first sign of the dreaded illness was bad breath. Sufferers would then feel lightheaded and nauseous, before experiencing pain in the groin and the terrifying appearance of the bubos, a lump the size of an apple, either on the neck, groin or armpit. By this stage, the victim would be vomiting blood; six in ten of those infected died.

Everywhere corpses were dumped in mass graves, where some of the bodies were seen to wriggle as victims struggled for their last breaths. There was no one left to help them; if they had living family, they had probably fled.

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As the disease spread across Italy, each city tried to prevent their neighbours from approaching, but it seemed impossible to stop. Some became fatalistic, and Orvieto’s Council of Seven decided to ignore the coming plague in case it scared people. Six of them died of the disease. In Ragusa the city government concluded that all they could do was order everyone to make a will.

Now in late 1348 the illness spread across England, averaging a mile a day, and the death rates were apocalyptic in parts: 80% were killed in Jarrow in County Durham. At one point, 200 a day were dying in London, a toll proportionately equivalent to 20,000 a day today. The city was described as a “Nomanneslond”, the sort of 28 Days Later ghost town scenario we associated with plague.

Almost everywhere in Europe suffered death rates of between one-third and a half, although pockets of Bohemia and Poland escaped; Italy perhaps suffered the worst, with up to 60% dead. Venice lost as many as three-quarters.

In contrast, Milan perhaps had higher survival rates, because its rulers, the ruthless Visconti family, ordered that any house where the plague was identified be boarded up and its inhabitants left to starve. In a later outbreak the city of Dubrovnik, now in Croatia, initiated the rule that all ships stay anchored for 40 days — quaranta — a sensible measure that appreciated the potential length of incubation periods.

Yet no one really knew much else. In October 1348, the King of France asked the leading thinkers at the University of Paris for their theories about what was causing the disease. Their best guess was that it was due to “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius”.

In other words, no one had a clue; inevitably, though, many blamed the disaster on loose morals, and such abominations as people dressing in sexually provocative clothes. Many countries introduced strict laws against gambling, prostitution and cohabiting, while Philip VI of France ordered for blasphemers to have their upper lip cut off. More tragically, many looked for scapegoats — firstly lepers, and then, more violently, Jews, with pogroms spreading across France and Germany.

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By Ed West

A second outbreak of the Plague struck Europe in 1361, known as the Mortality of Children as it especially killed the young, who had acquired no immunity from the first outbreak. Plague returned from time to time but eventually died out in Europe, the Marseilles outbreak of 1722 being the last. Most likely the pestilence-carrying black rat was driven out by its cousin the brown rat.

There have been other pandemics, the worst of all being smallpox, which has killed hundreds of millions. Even in the 20^th century, it cost far more lives than all wars combined. There is also influenza — first named in the 14^th century but only really a problem since the 16^th — which has produced various deadly strains. The 1889 pandemic, which originated in Russia, killed a huge number of notable individuals, including the second in line to the throne, Prince Albert Victor.

Most recently the Spanish Flu of 1919 killed as many as 100 million. Yet like the previous strain, it barely made any impact on the public consciousness, perhaps because it followed such a traumatic war.

Only the Black Death seared itself into the public consciousness, partly because of the social impact it had. In Paris a chronicler recorded that “those who were left drank, fornicated or skulked in the cellars according to their inclinations”. In Florence people were terrorised by the becchini, grave diggers whose motto was “Those who live in fear die” and drank and stole with abandon. In Venice criminals roamed the street because their jailors were all dead; everywhere crime increased, as did pregnancies.

The outbreak also led to growing anger at the authorities, especially the Church, which was already attracting criticism because of its great wealth. Clergymen were disproportionately hit by the disease, because they had to administer the Last Rites to the sick; those that survived tended to be the least diligent. Afterwards, totally unsuitable candidates were rushed in to replace them — often widowed men, teenagers or even petty criminals.

Anarchic new religious groups sprang up, the most notorious being the Brethren of the Cross, or Flagellants — fanatics who went from village to village where they would form a circle, confess their sins, then ritually beat themselves with a scourge made of iron spikes and needles. Soon they turned on Jews, priests and other figures of authority. There was also the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed to be in a state of grace and so it was fine for them to have guilt-free sex and even steal stuff.

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The disease had broken down normal restraints and barriers, and had even led to a breakdown in authority where the aristocracy had fled. By being able to leave cities, aristocrats had much lower death rates, one-quarter dying compared to half of peasants. And so an English ploughman’s wage went up from 2 shillings to 10 shillings by 1350, when craftsmen’s real incomes were three times what they were in 1300.

Authorities brought in various laws setting a maximum wage but they were widely ignored, and by the 1370s, 70% of legal business in English courts involved labour legislation. Authorities in Gloucestershire even built stocks to imprison those who took higher wages — but they had to pay the carpenter who built it 5 1/2d a day, twice the legal limit.

Lords were forced by labour shortages to ease the various onerous labour demands they made of their peasants, and so serfdom eventually disappeared. Before that happened, though, increasingly oppressive measures by the crown to put uppity peasants back in their place provoked an uprising in Essex and Kent. Somewhat less directly, chronic lack of manpower also spurred technological innovation, and may even have led to the invention of movable type by Johann Gutenberg the following century.

Without tempting fate, coronavirus isn’t going to be 28 Days Later, but neither is it just the regular flu, and it is bound to have a social impact. Perhaps it will increase pressure for reform in China and Iran, for example, or speed up the decoupling of the global economy. In the US universal healthcare may become a more urgent issue, especially if the country is badly affected and the prohibitive cost of testing is implicated.

More generally, it may spark more irritation with the sort of complacent, high-status, FT-reading brahmins who comprise our modern clergy, the sort of people who like to explain how the world is divided into open vs. closed —because they’re the least vulnerable to open systems.

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Their complacency on this issue arguably echoes their complacency about globalism generally, and an inability to see what really matters. From the time the virus first emerged, we’ve heard the same sort of platitudes we’re told about everything else: how the biggest danger facing us is ‘prejudice’ — not the actual fatal disease — and that the coronavirus “knows no borders”.

By contrast, those on the outside Right have noted how open societies seem especially vulnerable to a disease of globalisation, and the political alignment of a worldwide pandemic becomes obvious.

Contagious diseases historically raised fear of the outgroup, and already we have seen low-level violence against east Asians in Italy. We’re not going to get pogroms now, partly because children are largely unaffected — the fatality rate for the 0-9s in China still 0 per cent of the 416 confirmed cases —and that’s what really drives terror, but plagues do draw out our most atavistic fears. There is a theory that xenophobia is an evolutionary response to pathogens, since strangers are more likely to carry diseases that the in-group has no immunity to, and that’s why conservatives respond more strongly to disgust and value purity and cleanliness.

If the disease spreads, due to a failure to take measures quickly enough, then it will only increase people’s problem with globalisation. Alternatively, the lesson might be, as with aircraft safety, that well-co-ordinated international groups of experts are pretty effective at dealing with major problems, and should therefore be given more power. Although a pessimistic Tory, I’m certainly hoping for a Pinkerite Whiggish outcome.

One important change might be the way we see the least valued members of society. Our economy is especially vulnerable because, with three-quarters of children having two working parents, once the schools are shut then a huge chunk of the workforce needs to become “economically inactive”, as the government describes childcare. With communal clubs not an option, people my age would normally recruit their parents into babysitting duties, but for an illness that kills maybe one in six old people, that’s too much of a risk.

Perhaps, just as the Black Death perversely raised the value of the peasantry, so coronavirus will do the same for the elderly. Already people up and down the country are checking up on parents to make sure they’ve got alcohol spray, masks and gloves, and protect themselves from the virus. Already the illness has brought about a small cultural change.