The Covid pandemic is changing our world and changing our lives in ways that we hope will be positive, important, and enduring. The truth is that we will probably derive more pandemic insight from scrutinizing the past than from speculating about the future because no one pandemic is entirely separate from any other. In this deep dialogue we’ll meet a microscopic invader, the novel coronavirus, and come to know its most famous predecessors in the history of human pandemic diseases. We will become acquainted with our microscopic defenders — the infinitesimal but ferocious warriors of the human immune system which, in a valiant effort to save the human body, can tragically kill us in the process. Hort talks of how pandemics can represent a descent, “[T]he sense of descending into darkness, finding one’s personal identity, new identity and truth, and then emerging, the same but different [can be compared to] the caterpillar weaves the chrysalis, is transformed and re-conforms as a butterfly. . . I think there are some people who have gone through the lockdown and emerging as somebody different.”
