We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system.

But a lie is halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

Unlike war or famine or natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes during which people can gather together, an epidemic is a collective catastrophe that must be experienced separately.

Plagues reshape our familiar social order, require us to disperse and live apart, wreck economies, replace trust with fear and suspicion, invite some to blame others for their predicament, embolden liars, and cause grief. But plagues also elicit kindness, cooperation, sacrifice, and ingenuity.

For a few years after we either reach herd immunity or have a widely distributed vaccine, people will still be recovering from the overall clinical, psychological, social, and economic shock of the pandemic and the adjustments it required, perhaps through 2024. I’ll call this the intermediate pandemic period. Then, gradually, things will return to “normal” – albeit in a world with some persistent changes. Around 2024, the post-pandemic period will likely begin.

We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend became happy, you became happy.

It’s fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it’s harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying.

Social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they’re so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous that one has to ask what purpose they serve.

There are very fundamental reasons we live our lives in social networks, and if we really understood the role they’re playing in our society, we would take better care of social networks and find ways to take advantage of their power to improve our society.

The reason we form networks is because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. It’s to our advantage as individuals and a species to assemble ourselves in this fashion.