In his poem “An Anatomy of the World,” John Donne mused “There is no health; physicians say that we / At best enjoy but a neutrality.”

Renaissance thinkers were quite comfortable with the notion that we are always dying. In centuries since, a seductive sense of invulnerability has crept into our self-understanding.

A gross exaggeration of this mentality was hideously expressed this past week, but that shouldn’t deter us from confronting a useful lesson from these plague times, one neatly caught in Donne’s next couplet: "And can there be worse sickness than to know/ That we are never well, nor can be so?”