When I was in graduate school, four things happened at almost the same time (probably within a three year time frame, but who’s counting?) 1) The publication of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett (well, and my reading of the book); 2) the cultural phenomenon of “hot zone” movies and books, of which the most memorable is probably Outbreak starting Dustin Hoffman; and 3) the realization that a good part of the archaeology I was doing in the Congo was of villages that had been abandoned because a plague of some kind came along and killed enough people that everyone moved elsewhere, which is apparently a tradition in that area; and 4) the Zaire Ebola outbreak in Kikwit. Since I had been working in the area, I got involved, in a minor way, with some of the Ebola research, and I produced evidence for a model for the virus jumping from fuit bats to humans that turned out to be exactly what had happened about ten years later when the West African Ebola epidemic occurred. Continue reading Everything is as expected, even the Covid-19 pandemic →