Virginia Heffernan talks to history professor and disaster expert Dr. Scott Knowles about how care is rationed in the U.S., how the elite respond to panic, meditations on Albert Camus’ The Plague and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” and more.

Podcast production by Melissa Kaplan.

Further Reading:

#COVIDCALLS—Scott Knowles’s free daily Zoom conference connecting the public to experts talking about the coronavirus, Mondays at 5 p.m. EST.