UPDATED: January 9, 2021 07:31 IST
Winter solstice. Concealed in a cloud, Jupiter and Saturn kiss unseen. With 78 million lives interrupted by a speck of RNA gone rogue, Earth is a grisly planet. Even in an appalling year, because life is more than srushti pushti nashti, bookwards we leaned, inevitably reading more about pandemics. Words, words, words but you’ve heard that one before.
Mark Honigsbaum, with nine examples of pestilence, paints the 20th as The Pandemic Century. Armed with germ theory and antibiotics we swaggered while new pathogens spilt past species barriers. “The only thing that is certain is that there will be new pandemics and new plagues,” he guarantees.