What is the significance of the viral outbreak? Arguing that is “too early to say” denies the experience of earlier generations that have stood at this junction before. Because, as you will know, this is not the first time the human species is confronted with a crisis that is not ideological but biological in origins. Records dating all the way back (if not earlier) to the Plagues of Ancient Athens (430 BC) serve as the unconsciously entrenched, but sadly forgotten, reminder of previous effects and consequences of corporal corruption.
Episodes of pestilence, as Dr Bernard Rieux discovered in Camus’ The Plague, are somewhere located between trauma and fiction as a “bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away… [They are] not made to man’s measure.” The scale of today’s challenge is no longer confined to a specific town, country or even region. Neither does it move as slowly as the older ones did. While it once took many years for plagues and diseases to travel from one continent to the next, today cross-continental transmission occurs within a day. Awareness of the reality of a contamination that infects and disrupts all spheres of human life, from an entire political-economic system to the microscopic experiencing of being in time and place, is what makes the significance of this crisis real and unpredictable, symbolic yet intuitively uncanny.
The very word ‘crisis’, we should be aware, has a politics and geography of its own. The estimated annual number of deaths caused by malaria, for instance, stood at 405,000 in 2018. Sub-Saharan African countries are disproportionately affected and, therefore, especially vulnerable for the additional stress that COVID-19 will cause on their already overburdened health infrastructures. This is not to downplay the fact that COVID-19 constitutes a global crisis but, instead, to argue for the need to contextualise the lives that it threatens most. Crises are experienced differently depending upon race, gender, class and other categories of human difference. However, the biological underpinnings of COVID-19 make this crisis also a discriminatory human-centric (if not ape-centric) disease, which, as a result of the unprecedented interdependency of social and ecological systems, transforms it into the first global biological challenge of this century.
