The great epidemics of the past centuries heralded drastic changes in society.
Whether plague or cholera, AIDS or Ebola - all of them have turned the world upside down and, in the end, radically modernized it.
Even after the corona epidemic, our world will be different.
“Like all pandemics,” writes the medical historian Frank M. Snowden from Yale University in the recently updated preface to his epochal work “Epidemics and Society”, “Covid-19 is not a random event. Epidemics hit societies through the specific vulnerabilities that humans have created through their relationships with the environment, with other species and with one another. The microbes that cause pandemics are those that evolution has best equipped to fill the ecological niches that we have created ourselves. "