I completed the main text of this book a few days before Coronavirus, as it was called at the beginning, started to become a major story in the news in Europe. Now, just over three months later, as the book is about go for printing it seems as if the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is now called, is about the only story in the world’s media. In the circumstances, it seems important that I say something about the virus and its potential impact on the subject of this book. As I write these words, in early Ma y 2020, the pandemic has killed at least 264,000 people worldwide and some 3.8 million people are confirmed to have been infected, although the actual number is likely to be significantly higher as many people who have had the virus may not have had it confirmed through testing. To put this in context, the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people, while the highly publicised outbreak of SARS in 2003 killed fewer than 1,000 people. The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in Africa resulted in the deaths of an estimated 11,300 people. So COVID-19 is far and away the largest pandemic, in terms of deaths, to hit the world in just over a century. Of course, we do not yet know the final death toll from it, for as I write it is still continuing. Furthermore, unlike SARS and Ebola this virus is a true pandemic, affecting virtually every part of the planet where human beings live.
From the Publications Chair