• BEING quarantined and monitored (cf Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Albert Camus’s The Plague), demonstrate the precariousness of the human condition.

We are “responsible” for our behaviour (whether hoarding or helping), showing acts of philanthropy or greed, revealing under stress who we really are, our responses of courage, prejudice, fear, cowardice, denial, and exposing society’s inequalities (who is and isn’t tested?), the gaps in medical safety-nets, humanitarian priorities and the interventionist role of the state.

Everything is up for grabs now.

We could learn some profound lessons.

MIKE BOR
St George’s Fields, W2