China Should Fear the Coronavirus. Look What Plague Did to Ancient Athens.

James Holmes

History, Asia

As moral and ethical strictures collapsed, Athenians gave vent to their basest impulses and excesses. All manner of riotous living ensued. Why not indulge today if tomorrow you die? Would China do the same? 

Epidemics rank among the worst traumas that can befall a society. Their impact goes far beyond the sheer loss of human lives, every one of them valuable. Disease can recast the fates of peoples, generally for the worse. Small wonder the Bible lists plague among the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Pestilence, prophesies the Book of Revelation, will ravage the earth in company with Famine, War, and Death—preparing the way for the Last Judgment. At present China is experiencing a foretaste of the end times in the form of the novel coronavirus, an affliction that first surfaced in Wuhan late last December. Fears of contagion prompted the public-health authorities to order a quarantine that left this city of 11 million a ghost town.

No quarantine is perfect, China’s least of all. The Chinese Communist Party hardly helped matters by dispatching strongmen to harass and silence Dr. Li Wenliang, who first reported the coronavirus on social media, for “making false comments” and “spreading rumors.” False, of course, means anything that embarrasses Beijing, including inconvenient facts. Delaying and dissembling in the midst of a public-health crisis is a hazardous business. Stricken travelers have since carried the coronavirus beyond Wuhan and beyond China’s borders. It remains anyone’s guess across how much of the earth’s surface the fell rider will gallop, and how many souls he will harvest along his way.