The Pandemic and The Probity

One of the mistakes one could do is to compare a pandemic like Corona today with the Spanish Flue of 1918 or the Plague of Europe even before that.
Then the expectancy of human life was less than forty years even in Europe. The literature of Charles Dickens, Maupassant or Tolstoy is full of details of the people who are unable to control either their fertility or their fate. In turn their progeny suffer dire poverty and its consequences. The lives of these illustrious writers were those of a victim of the prevailing social conditions in most cases. Be it deprivation or affluence.
Then an epidemic breaks out and the world reaches to a condition where a war is waiting for it. At times, in the middle of a war, it is caught by an epidemic which takes a heavy toll on either side.
In fact, the contemporary literature of that time, elsewhere too, is full of such descriptions.
The magnificent growth of science since then has made those diseases treatable with very cheap and easily available medicines today. Besides the standards of hygiene today are way ahead than those times.
So, if ever, the humanity is better prepared today than ever before to stem an epidemic or a pandemic long before it reaches the proportions of the old times.
Also, we fortunately live in the age of information which has made it impossible to hold it back for a long time. It spreads in real time all over the world at once.
So, theoretically, it is impossible for an epidemic to terrorize the people like in old times, even in poor societies, which have an easy access to information.
However, it the memory of those epidemics, passed on over the generations, which haunt the people and causes panic among them.
Also, in some cases, the complacent attitude of the people about their safety from a recent epidemic like Corona have left them vulnerable to its ravages even in the affluent part of the world.
It is also important to be watchful about the political implications of Corona as well. Some politicians, who were standing on a shaky ground, could use this situation to fortify their position by doing things which could make the situation worse.
Like black-marketers and hordes, who try to enhance their capital in such conditions, politicians could use this epidemic to gain a political capital.
Therefore an ongoing vigilance is necessary on the part of the savvy, to preempt the possibility that such nefarious designs are allowed to prevail unbridled while the society loses. The standard of probity are still poor among the people who are benefiting from the system prevailing.