For years I have liked to listen to science podcasts while I run. The English education system required me to choose very early; by fourteen the English are artists or scientists and two years later, often, linguists or social scientists or arts people. I wanted all the languages, because I didn’t plan to stay in England, and so my scientific education was over by sixteen. It took me longer than it should have done to realise what I’d lost, and I began, haphazardly, to fill some gaps. I’m not sure a person can be a critical thinker without some understanding of data and statistics. I rediscovered a childhood fascination for human biology, and in conversation with scientist friends remembered that ‘science’, after all, means ‘knowledge’, and it makes no sense to construct walls between ways of knowing.

Epidemiology is particularly interesting to novelists, whose characters imagine themselves autonomous but are in fact patterns in the author’s mind. Many real-life humans also overestimate their own autonomy (if you doubt this, drop a brick on your foot and see how much freedom of action you have in that moment, only don’t because the NHS has enough to deal with right now). For lucky people in lucky places, it’s possible to forget that we live at the mercy not only of our educations and our neighbours and whoever is in charge, but of our nervous systems, the electricity in our hearts, the bacteria in our blood and guts and, of course, any viruses looking for a new home, which is what viruses do (they have no autonomy either).

Anyway, I listen to epidemiology podcasts, and a few days ago I listened to one from The Guardian exploring, among other matters, why it might be that men seem more vulnerable to Covid-19 than women. Since at that point it was being suggested in the UK and Ireland that people with chronic medical conditions and those over the age of 70 should be subject to indefinite house arrest – in Ireland this is sweetly called ‘cocooning’ but it’s the same thing – it occurred to me that the same logic would imply that men should be locked down longer and harder than women and children. I wrote to The Guardian wondering if anyone else had had this thought. I don’t, I emphasise, think it is a good idea, it just seemed no worse than several ideas that were apparently being taken seriously at the time. Since people of colour also seem more vulnerable than white people, fat people than thin people, poor people than rich people, the same logic would eventually liberate affluent, thin, young white women and all healthy children and leave everyone else locked up. Though I’d have some faith in a world run by children, I have no taste for the racist, sexist and sizeist implications of the rest of that arrangement. My point was that Darwinian thinking destroys some earlier than others but will come for everyone in the end, that ‘solutions’ to contagion that are solutions only for some people are not really solutions at all. Covid-19 in the UK reinforces and even exacerbates most existing social injustice, harming poorer, older, more vulnerable people and people of colour more and faster than it harms the traditional holders of power. The only moment when this disease seems not to conform to Tory priorities is in killing more men than women, and so I gestured in jest towards the logical conclusion of the Malthusian story of the plague year. I don’t want a world run by women or by men, I want a world run by decent human beings with an adequate grasp of social and environmental as well as medical science and a commitment to social justice.

(All that said, I’d rather be in Germany, New Zealand or Denmark than England this summer, but I dare say that’s just coincidence. And I still think school-aged kids might do quite a good job of running the country – it would give them constructive occupation over the summer while their parents get back to work.)