A ‘loneliness pandemic’ could prove as dangerous as coronavirus

The subjugation of nature has formed a cornerstone of the human agenda. How surprising and humbling, then, to find our way of life so rapidly and unexpectedly undermined by a biological force that transcends identity and culture. Still worse, when we discover that the source of this chaos is a sub-microscopic viral particle whose genetic code — simpler than a bacterium — is barely compatible with a living entity. Yet it has brought global civilisation to a standstill.

The stark and poetic prose of Paolo Giordano’s essay How Contagion Works conveys the existential angst of an Italian intellectual as he comes to terms with quarantine: the vulnerabilities, missed opportunities, loneliness, fear of annihilation and the realisation that humanity’s supporting structures are ‘a house of cards’. Until now a determined individualist, Giordano is struck by the realisation that the infrastructure of our globalised era is a complex nexus of communication. ‘If the interactions of human beings were drawn in pen,’ he writes, ‘the world would be a giant scribble.’