But the people who have no God also live in fear — and that’s not fear of the virus so much as fear of the poor or fear of what the virus will do to them.

“What will happen to the poor people?” some ask. By that they don’t really mean, “How will the poor survive?” The rich have always been in awe of the resilience of the poor, as they pay them monthly wages that are a fraction of the bill for their own three-year-old’s birthday party. What the rich worry about is that if the poor really starve — and this time they actually might starve — the poor will come for them to try to eat them.

The nonpoor, be they godless or godful, try to console themselves by sitting at home and telling each other that this epidemic is nature’s way of healing itself. Consumerism was destroying the planet, and now we have the chance to save it by organizing Zoom parties and baking cakes.

The poor don’t have anywhere to turn. Mosques are Pakistan’s only social centers, except for the clubs of the very rich and some parks for the middle class. They are equipped with public-address systems and have running water; many are air-conditioned. Mosques could have been used to disseminate health tips and distribute food to the needy, or as quarantine centers and temporary hospitals.

But the government is too reluctant to take on the men of God to do any of that. So mosques, the very places that might have provided relief to the people, have been left to become, at best, battlegrounds over God’s intentions or, at worst, incubators of infection.

Before Pakistan had a coronavirus problem, it had a polio problem. The country came very close to eliminating that one, but the polio virus has resurfaced: Some people were refusing to get their children vaccinated because they feared that the United States government was using the inoculation program to spy on them. They were also thinking: If God wants to cripple our children, who are we to stop Him?

Soon after the lockdown of Karachi began last month, I called up a doctor friend who worked at the front lines of an anti-polio campaign in the city a few years ago. He told me that while his team administered polio drops in hostile neighborhoods he would stay a street away. Because you just never knew, he said: Here you were wanting to save somebody’s newborn from losing the use of her limbs, but the parents might just shoot you in the head for interfering with God’s plan.