But not everyone will behave badly. Camus’ story also has heroes, though these aren’t the sort of heroes found in most other novels. Instead, the heroes are the doctors, the volunteers who help them, and even a civil servant, Monsieur Grand, who seeks to deal with the plague by recording it, measuring it, and keeping track of what has happened: “This insignificant and self-effacing hero who had nothing to recommend him but a little goodness in his heart and apparently a ridiculous ideal. This would be to give the truth its due, to give the sum of two and two as four.” Grand, Dr. Rieux, and a few others try to use science, transparency, and accuracy to contain and control the disease and to save as many people as possible, without giving in to hysteria or despair: “It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.”

These are the kinds of people who will be the heroes in our era, too. The scientists and public-health scholars who immediately put out information about numbers and cases; the research teams that immediately began to work on vaccines; the nurses and doctors who immediately decide to remain inside quarantined regions, as many did in Italy, as well as in Wuhan, China. Not all of their judgments will be correct, and they will not always agree with one another: There is no precise way to determine which quarantines and cancellations are prudent and which are unreasonable, given the potential economic effects on the one hand, and the real desire to slow the spread of the epidemic on the other. In Italy, there have already been a few public squabbles among virologists who have different estimates of how bad the disease will be.

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But at least they have the public’s interest at heart. Here is a rule of thumb to use in the coming weeks: Judge politicians by how much and how clearly they defer to the people who give the sum of two and two as four. What you want is accurate information, not politicized information. And the more the better. After four years of hearing, in the words of a British politician, that “we’ve had enough of experts,” this is the moment when the value of expertise has suddenly become crystal clear. Suddenly, facts matter.

Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact. The Chinese have already paid a high price for the secretiveness of their system, and for the top-down bureaucratic culture that led many, initially, to conceal the disease. By contrast, one of the reasons Italians aren’t panicking more is that they have confidence in the public-health system, and indeed the system in the broader sense of the word, despite Salvini and his disinformation campaigns. Italy has already tested many thousands of people for the virus—testing is free, of course—which is one of the reasons the numbers are so much higher there than elsewhere. People know this, and repeat it to one another, sometimes joking about it (“We Italians are too honest”) but it is a source of pride. Few others in Europe, so far, are testing that widely. And, of course, the U.S. is not doing anything of the sort.