The end of coronavirus: what plague literature tells us about our future

From Thucydides to Camus, there are plenty of hopeful reminders that there’s nothing unprecedented about the coronavirus lockdown - and that pandemics do end

Shortly before the London lockdown, at an eerily quiet branch of Waterstones, I managed to get my hands on The Decameron, by Boccaccio,and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. But Camus’s The Plaguehad gone the way of dried pasta and toilet roll; there was just a desolate gap on the shelves where the copies had once been.

The primary lesson of plague literature, from Thucydides onwards, is how predictably humans respond to such crises. Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behaviour during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine.