Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all illnesses—including COVID-19—are social problems for humans to solve.

David Barnes
David Barnes is an associate professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1995).