Contagion: Living With And Through The Plague

What an unprecedented experience the last two years has brought. A global populace has been in a state of extreme trepidation. An instinct for imposing draconian rules to maintain public order was revealed by governments of all persuasions around the world. Meanwhile the global economy shuddered almost to a standstill. Not through nuclear warfare or the climate crisis, both of which continue to present existential threats to humanity, but by a virus we have known about for at least a couple of decades. A pathogen so tiny it remains invisible to the naked eye.

Apart from the death toll, now exceeding 5.143 million people, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has caused the suicide rate to jump, mental health problems to increase as families and loved ones remain isolated from each other, disruptions and civil disobedience to be met by rubber bullets and riot police, and a spate of conspiracy theories ranging from the intriguing to the plainly absurd to fascinate the popular press. At the same time every individual has experienced the pandemic from wildly different perspectives.

Contagion is a collection of ten essays commissioned by my friends in 2021 at the height of the Convid-19 pandemic. Each essay explores one or more aspects of life and death, business and education, health and travel, as we face potentially the most grievous biomedical threat to humanity since the Spanish Flu over a century ago.
Each of the ten essays in this anthology is connected in some way to the current pandemic. Akin to Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearances in each of his movies, the spectre of Covid-19 is ever present, though not always overtly, within the context of each of the dialogues. I want readers to take away an understanding of the impermanent nature of knowledge, and the shifting nature of truth, as shards of information spill and cascade around us, while misinterpretations that we bring to any narrative that matters, intermingle in ways that prance into our consciousness and embed.