Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

by David Quammen

MacDonald got some of his field experience in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) during the late 1930s, just after a calamitous malaria epidemic there in 1934–1935, which sickened a third of the Ceylonese populace and killed eighty thousand. The severity of the Ceylon epidemic had been surprising because the disease was familiar, at least in parts of the island, recurring as modest annual outbreaks that mostly affected young children. What happened differently in 1934–1935 was that, after a handful of years with little malaria at all, a drought increased breeding habitat for mosquitoes (standing pools in the rivers, instead of flowing current), whose population then multiplied hugely, carrying malaria into areas where it had been long absent and where most people—especially the young children—possessed no acquired immunity.

Dayum