It was 1348 and the Black Plague was ravaging Europe. Ten young people, seven women and three males sought refuge in a villa outside Fiesole, above Florence, to escape contagion.

Thus was born Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, each participant had to tell ten stories which range from the erotic to the morality tale.

I don’t know why but all this week I have been reminded of Boccaccio’s book. As I see it, it would have been far safer for friends and families to have, for instance, rented a farmhouse in Gozo and spend days in that fresh air (maybe spending time telling stories or watching videos) than crowding in supermarkets.

But to carry on with literary links - a friend sent me a link to a 1981 book by Dean Koontz The Eyes of Darkness which says that “in around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”

Later on in the same book, a character says: “You have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff 'Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center.

“Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other living creature can carry it. And like syphillis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive outside a living human body for longer than a minute, which means it can’t permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent microorganisms can. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit.”

All through this week I have been half expecting some news feed to tell us that a first sufferer of the virus has been identified in Malta.

These past days we have grown used to see other countries get this announcement – there are now some 47 countries, the last being as I write Belarus, New Zealand and Nigeria, the most densely populated country in Africa.

Five more countries have reported their first case, all with travel history connected to Italy – Estonia, Denmark, the Netherlands and Lithuania.

There is a first case in Wales and the first Briton from the Diamond Princess cruise liner has died.

There are now as I write (Friday afternoon) 80,000 contaminated persons in 40 different countries. More than 70 have died outside China.

The impact on world trade is enormous and we will all have to pay for it later on. Although as Giorgia Meloni told the Italian parliament it hardly makes sense to ban football matches but leave discos open.

My mind goes back to the early 1970s when the paper I was working for, the Church paper Il-Hajja came out one day with a poster 'Cholera suspicion in Malta'.

Dom Mintoff, freshly elected and fighting the British for more money, lost it, really lost it at small us and turned the big guns of the state against us.

There had been cases of cholera in Naples and the paper later proved there had been investigation of a potential cholera case which, just as the case with two Italians this week proved to be negative.

Today there are far more news sources than the four newspapers of the 1970s and besides with the social media every person has become an editor. There is thus more urgency for avoiding unbiased speculation and for allowing the official investigations to take place.

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