I'm re-reading Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. I'd forgotten there's a section on how, during such crises, people become prone to irrational beliefs and charlatans promoting, for want of a better expression, 'conspiracy theories' and anti-scientific ideas, and how these obsessional beliefs engender paranoia and the threat of group violence against 'non believers'. Maybe it's just something that (some) humans do in such times...
#Pandemic #conspiracytheory