Epidemic Ecstasy

The week I received these four beautiful articles moving out from and through Epidemic Empire was also the week during which India’s COVID-19 case count flew past all previous pandemic records. At the time of writing, daily infection rates have hovered in the mid-300,000s for more than a week, following a peak of 414,188 on May 7, 2021. Twenty-four million total cases have been counted, and at least 260,000 people have died.1 The scenes of anguish are familiar to us now, amplified by the exoticist horror of the English-languagemedia, both in India and abroad: patients die alone on the sidewalk outside inadequate and overwhelmed and hospitals, waiting for a bed, struggling to breathe. Some say these estimates are as little as an eighth of the real numbers. Hundreds of thousands more are believed to be suffering and dying far from COVID testing sites, and hospitals in the rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal.2 Others are dying at home, untested and uncounted. Oxygen and ventilators are in such short supply that hospitals are instructing patients to bring their own tanks, and a black market in oxygen is flourishing, something medical anthropologist Paul Farmer warned about in a brief editorial I shared with my students in a course called Public Writing and Public Health just a few weeks ago.3 I told those students—practicing nurses, doctors, public health advocates, and social workers—that their expertise mattered. That to write well about science is as much about observation and humility as it is about pitching timely stories and crafting beautiful sentences. That to supplement the work of the clinic with the skills of the critic was their responsibility. In the era of Trump and Modi, we have needed to say “Listen to the science,” but this, too, is a