You know Umair, the way so many Americans are behaving at the moment has been niggling me. Why is it familiar?

I finally worked it out as I read your article. Some Americans are behaving the way Medieval people did during the first pandemic of the Black Death in 1347-50. They are clinging to familiar rituals and partying, almost daring death to come for them as people did in 1347.

Luckily the deathrate for covid 19 is nowhere near as bad - Yersinia pestis wiped out a third to a half of the inhabitants of Europe. No, no one knows what the R-rate was but it was probably high because plague had the same superpower as covid 19: you could have plague for weeks before you actually got ill and all during that time you were spreading the disease.

The partying especially is a part of that mass hysteria - as if ignoring a disease, defying it to kill them, would keep it away.

In 1347 nobody had any idea why plague behaved as it did; nobody had even heard of bacteria, let alone viruses. Plague was the sword of God's wrath. The best science then talked of miasmas - they believed plague was spread by miasmas or smells and bad airs. Nothing they had worked except quarantine and isolation - which didn't happen while you partied. Europe lost half its population and was forever changed. There was an economic depression for almost a century. Look at the paintings of the Dance of Death if you don't believe me.

In most countries of the world now, most people have a basic grasp of modern science, the single best method for finding out physical truths that we have. Most people have a basic trust in science and in each other.

Not, it seems, in Republican America. There they're acting exactly like medieval peasants.

It's horrifying and sad.