Everyday life and other conditions of normality were affected to such an extent during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that it seemed to many that they were living through a quite exceptional situation. However, a look to medical history quickly reminds us that, while what was experienced seemed exceptional to many, the sudden onset of an infectious disease that led to widespread and rapid restructuring of social possibilities was not unique. Epidemic diseases have emerged and re-emerged throughout history and they are imprinted in our cultural memory.¹

Medical history points not only to the ordinariness of epidemics, their matter-of-factness, but also to the ordinary, regular patterns according to which they occur. With regard to the former, what makes epidemic diseases ordinary, epidemiologically speaking, is that the conditions for their occurrence are always already in place: new viruses will emerge, known viruses will mutate to pose threats, and pathogenic conditions – usually related to the broader eco-social environment and the organisation of our living – will materialise. The medical historian Frank Snowden (2008) had long warned against viewing them as something conquered or a thing of the past, and other scholars have warned against the hubristic attitude of doing so (Garrett, 2018). With regard to the latter, medical history teaches us that the recurrence of epidemics and their shock value have led to certain tropes in the way we talk about them, the way we expect them to develop and come to a close, and in the narratives we tell about them. Epidemics, that is, have a form.

Charles Rosenberg, writing in 1989, recognised this form as drama and went on to propose a model of dramaturgic logic in the way they unfold: ‘epidemics start at a moment in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and duration, follow a plot line of increasing and revelatory tension, move to a crisis of individual and collective character, then drift toward closure’ (Rosenberg, 1989: 2).

Epidemics, Rosenberg posits, proceed according to certain stages, initially ‘progressive revelation’ and ‘recognition’ of the event followed by coping strategies and closure. At the heart of Rosenberg’s scheme lies intelligibility. There is no ambiguity with regard to what occurs. He notes that unlike other aspects of biological history that can proceed imperceptibly until ‘discovered’ by historians, epidemics are ‘highly visible’ phenomena (Rosenberg, 1989: 1–2). This underlies the predictability of their development which progresses along a pattern of beginning-middle-end. Other scholars have pointed to their formulaic structure: there are repetitive tropes, images, characters and storylines along which we talk about epidemics, and arguably in the way we experience them (Wald, 2008). The literary form of epidemic disease is no coincidence. David Steel, whose 1981 essay essentially establishes a literary canon, remarks that: ‘epidemic diseases … share with works of literature an inherent structure, an aetiology, rising from an onset, through a climax to a decline and an ending’ (Steel, 1981: 107).

This affinity may be ‘inherent’, to a degree, but it is also confirmed as such by the way we look at epidemics. Paul Slack aptly notices that the long heritage of texts that chronicled their various occurrences through time themselves followed an archetype:

The textual heritage of epidemics taught us to look for certain patterns in their unfolding: recurring characters such as the ‘patient zero’, stories of infectiousness, suspicion towards possible carriers and so on. These were consolidated in repetition; by the practice of specifically looking to epidemics in the past and recognising these features. Scholars were guided to this by their attention-drawing aspect. As the historian Margaret Pelling observes, in the historiographical record there is a disparity of attention with regard to epidemic and endemic disease. Endemic disease, the regular cause of morbidity and mortality in a given area, tends, she says, to be considered normal and thus neglected. Epidemic disease, on the other hand, is dramatic and tends to hold our attention (Pelling, 2020: 294–295).

The insights offered above, are the product of analysis and thus derive from externalised perspectives. They are thoughts about the phenomenon ‘from above’, or from a physical and conceptual distance, or after the fact. They also consciously draw upon a specified written culture. They do not reflect the global aspects of epidemics. In the context of the current pandemic, scholars have revisited those models and tropes, questioning and revising them. Felicity Callard, writing from a human geography perspective, highlights how Rosenberg’s model posits unities that are not as stable as implied: ‘Rosenberg, in offering a dramaturgical logic to describe epidemic time, not only establishes a stage, but a particular sequencing of beginning, middle, and end. Any dramaturgical logic installs an imagined point from which the observer watches a plot line develop and, then, perhaps, resolve’ (Callard, 2020: 728).

Proposing a different vantage point, what she calls ‘thinking from the sickbed’, Callard asks instead ‘what kind of observation is possible when one is deeply entangled in what is unfolding’ (Callard, 2020: 728). Her work takes two major public-initiated themes that originated within the context of the pandemic. One is the naming of the extended form of a COVID infection, that is, ‘long COVID’. Callard notes that the particular phrase was a patient-bestowed name rather than one ascribed by medical professionals and that choice of the adjective ‘long’ – rather than any other term that would imply ‘post’ COVID – entails the undoing of temporal linearity and also of externally imposed time frames into the discussion of disease (Callard, 2020). The very term ‘long COVID’ complicates the sequence of beginning-middle-end of the pandemic itself.

The other theme concerns sufferers of chronic conditions, particularly Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), who recognised in the symptoms of long COVID similarities with the reality they have been experiencing for many years and which has been largely unnoticed or downplayed. The visibility of long COVID afforded visibility of their condition and this, remarks Callard, upsets the temporality of a pandemic narrative by allowing us to imagine a group of people who have essentially been waiting, in a sense, for the pandemic in order for their own concerns to become perceivable and to be given proper attention in the public and the scientific eye (Callard, 2020: 732). Thus, this ‘collective thinking from the sickbed’ has ‘disturbed common epidemiological and medical means of adjudicating illness time’ (Callard, 2020: 737). Instead of the linear conventions of medical science, whereby assigning severity and acuteness or chronicity also assigns valuations of suffering and of time, we are left with a ‘difficult’ temporality where ‘different patients inhabit different temporal horizons, different narrative scripts, different histories, different experiences of duration’ (Callard, 2020: 737).

Other scholars argue that we do not only need a look into epidemics from a different vantage point, but nothing short of a deconstruction of the models that circumscribe them. The historian Richard Keller notes how ‘limiting’ Rosenberg’s dramaturgy is, because ‘to circumscribe the pandemic with such a narrative device is to make it discrete rather than one facet of a broader experience of late capitalist modernity, or of peak Anthropocene’ (Langstaff, 2020: para. 19 of 66). Guillaume Lachenal and Gaëtan Thomas argued for ‘emancipat[ing] the historical narration of epidemics from a set of literary tropes cemented by centuries of intertextuality’ (Lachenal and Thomas, 2020: 671). Looking to the multifaceted perspectives developed within African studies on the afterlives of pandemics, they reach a conceptual framework that rejects their notion as ‘events oriented towards their own closure’ and proposes instead their viewing as ‘unsettling, seemingly endless, periods during which life has to be recomposed’ (Lachenal and Thomas, 2020: 672). Lachenal and Thomas draw also on Jeremy Greene’s and Dora Vargha’s (2020) reflection on the elusive endings of pandemics and on the history of the AIDS epidemic, which leads to a reversal of Rosenberg’s definition of the epidemic from ‘event’ into ‘trend’ (Lachenal and Thomas, 2020: 680). Their perspective allows for no fixed points, either of ending or beginnings. They observe that the African experience is characterised by ‘copresence of deep and recent epidemic pasts’ and so epidemics are ‘best understood (and experienced) as contemporary to previous ones, nested into one another, like Russian dolls’ (Lachenal and Thomas, 2020: 682).

Such explorations allow us to consider causes, management, experiences through varied contexts, inclusive of global perspectives. They allow us to zero in on the inequality and disparity of experience within the same geographical area, the same social bounds. This is what is gained, for instance, by Callard’s analysis and its questioning of the linear temporality in epidemics. Conversely, we can also expand our view from the regional and the specific to greater scales. However, there is also something to be lost. Opening the form of epidemics can open our eyes to complex global issues and patterns, such as broad or global health inequalities, or generalisable human behaviours, but it can also blind us to the significance of each event to an individual life. There is a danger that the visibility of what is grander, complex and encompassing will come at the expense of what is single and singularised.

In this discussion we reflect on the relation between the intellectual constructs of the epidemic phenomenon and its meaning as an occurrence within an individual life. We begin by acknowledging that certain elements of epidemic discourse have a basis in disease behaviour and as such they cannot be denied. To be specific, a defining aspect of epidemics is their emergence which, at the most basic level, is a breaking off with the extant public health conditions in a given area. Compared to endemic disease, epidemics have the capacity to surprise us, they are unanticipated or unusual – that is, in some manner they do rise. This suggests that a basic pattern of arise-rise-fall does circumscribe epidemics, even though in actuality those specified points can be elusive. We further suggest that in the context of the current pandemic we have conceptually followed that pattern, guided not only through pervasive intellectual constructs, but mainly through the information and data-driven culture within which we have experienced the coronavirus pandemic unfolding.

This pattern, on its own, does not do justice to the meaning of an epidemic for an individual as a life-event. This much has been shown by the corrective views offered by recent scholarly discussion. Callard’s analysis has shown us that if epidemics are drama there is a multiplicity of other dramas enfolded into the main one, with different rhythms and structures. Lachenal and Thomas (2020) have made us aware that there is no event–aftermath dyad; that life becomes recomposed exactly as the seemingly endless period of a pandemic goes on. Our discussion proposes that a way to unveil the separate, individual rhythms of the enfolded dramas of the epidemic is to consider them as ‘events’ in the specific way posited by phenomenological theory.

Our premise is the following: (1) the defining element of an epidemic is its emergence, its onset: where it peaks or how it ends are important structural elements, but not necessary to define it. Indeed, epidemics come into being once proclaimed as such. (2) This emergence or onset is recognised in specified ways in epidemiological terms, it signifies a breaking off from extant conditions. This means something unsettles the norms and thus is extraordinary in some way. (3) Emergence and extraordinariness are two prominent conceptual threads that allow us to understand epidemics. However, we need a separate account regarding what makes something extraordinary epidemiologically versus what makes it extraordinary in the context of lived experience. These two are qualitatively different concepts. We suggest, therefore, that within epidemicity, which follows a priori aetiological and explanatory frameworks, various epidemic life-events transpire that are truly original in that they are neither anticipated nor fully explained by pre-existing frameworks. To do justice, then, to the complexity of the several manifestations of the epidemic reality, we need an equally complex conceptual framework, one that is co-produced by historical and philosophical insight.

Senses of ‘event’

We talk of epidemics as extraordinary events. To formally declare one requires making use of the very term. A PHEIC (Public Health Emergency of International Concern), such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, is an ‘extraordinary event that may constitute a public health risk to other states through international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response’ (WHO, 2005).² The guidance describes a situation that is serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected. The term ‘event’ here is being used in the common, everyday sense of ‘significant occurrence’. In this sense, ‘extraordinary’ suggests a breaking off with conditions of normality as they are understood in a given situation. The epidemic as it happens to an individual, though, and its meaning, cannot be exhausted in that factually defined occurrence. We need to distinguish between these two notions of an epidemic. We will do this by defining ‘event’, following phenomenological theorist Claude Romano, as the reconfiguration of possibility in one’s life that is truly original and refers only to itself. By contrast, epidemicity rests on factual conditions and contexts that pre-exist and explain it.

Epidemicity

The Dictionary of Epidemiology defines epidemic as follows:

According to the above, what seems to define epidemic disease – where the extraordinariness lies – is this capacity to unsettle the usual conditions of public health in a given area. It is not about morbidity or mortality per se, but their excess in relation to existing norms. Thus, epidemicity is of relative originality in that this always depends on the state of conditions that it comes to unsettle.

This breaking off with normalcy conditions, however these are defined, is the rising of the epidemic. The identification of that moment in time may fluctuate. Some may choose to equate the beginning with first recorded cases, others with first acute hospitalisations. Other perspectives may defer the beginning still further and argue that the real start occurs at the microscopic level, when the infection actually takes place. Depending on the scale used, the beginning of the epidemic may be fixed or flexible, but it is always accessible as a point in time. This is because the beginning of the epidemic is necessarily linked to the aetiological framework of disease. Even if we follow an open form, we cannot do completely away with a point of origin, a point of emergence. Even in regions of repeated outbreaks, we can recognise a trend, but within this trend it would still be possible to identify beginnings of separate cycles of epidemicity. This is the essential condition of an epidemic: that it rises and because of this it is expected to fall. This is apprehensible in the specified conditions of epidemiology. It is not the same as recognition, though.

The recognition that Rosenberg identifies as stage one of an epidemic is not an unaided, immediate and unmediated grasping of reality. Both an epidemic and a pandemic require a formal announcement to be perceived as such. In a sense, then, the very naming of a disease as ‘epidemic’ makes it so in an instant of performative language. This is more pronounced in modern societies where death has retreated in visibility and happens largely out of the public eye (Mellor, 1992; Mellor and Shilling, 1993). Following the pronouncement, recognition then proceeds along evidence that nowadays is more and more quantitative in nature, such as death numbers, hospitalisations, the rate of infection, and so on. We do not wish to draw too bold a distinction line here: epidemics in pre-modern societies were understood by morbidity and mortality numbers. However, it is notable that in plague writing of the Renaissance, for instance, the medical historian Margaret Healy recognises two major themes: one of ‘supernatural or natural explanation as to the “how” and “why” of the affliction’ and a second of ‘the eyewitness account that details signs, symptoms, and the effect of epidemic in society in visual and moral terms’ (Healy, 2001: 61–62). In a way, we still bear witness to the effects of the epidemic through the personal stories that feature in the news and which give shape to the notion of infectiousness. However, for the most part we follow the epidemic through data and graphs. We interpret and visualise epidemics in a particular way, mainly through the wave graph, which is itself laden with metaphorical and symbolic meaning beyond its objective values (Eyler, 2002; Jones and Helmreich, 2020). Epidemic data reach us with added, expert, interpretation. Hence in modern-day epidemics, the recognition that one is living through an epidemic is progressively a mediated act, albeit one that is punctuated by the deaths and illness of friends and family members.

What is more, the data culture surrounding epidemics does not simply describe the phenomenon. Rather, it creates anticipation spurred by our aim to predict the course of the disease. But our anticipation is not necessarily met. For instance, the crisis, the peak of an epidemic, can be theoretically located on the fixed, and determinable, point of greatest number of cases or excess deaths. As we reach a point that data sketch out as critical, this may also be deferred by conversations that look to the future; to another wave, to the possibility of a number that is bigger yet. The same happens with resolution. We can fix it on the ending point of measures being lifted, or case numbers falling, but, as happened with the official date of lifting restrictions in the UK, this point can be set and then invalidated – while the falling number can turn out as too fragile a factor. Indeed, as Greene and Vargha reflect: ‘at their best, epidemic endings are a form of relief for the mainstream “we” that can pick up the pieces and reconstitute a normal life. At their worst, epidemic endings are a form of collective amnesia, transmuting the disease that remains into merely someone else’s problem’ (Greene and Vargha, 2020: para. 27 of 31).

In other words, as the drama of the epidemic unfolds, we do not proceed with clarity from one stage to another, but we are waiting for each one of these stages. The absence of a fixed ending is immaterial in this respect. The essential form through which we discuss epidemics creates waiting for, and anticipation of, an ‘aftermath’, a continuously projected future. This future is neither truly authentic nor solely based on the particular epidemic that happens now. It is shaped by our collective epidemic past and the way this is revived through experience, direct comparison with past epidemics, through interpretation, and through its preservation in text. In sum, it can be said that epidemicity is of relative originality or exceptionality, of more or less established form, and of mediated intelligibility. More than that, it is impersonal.

Epidemic as life-event

An epidemic occurs within a community, but is not assigned to anyone specifically, it befalls all of us. The epidemic as life-event, by contrast, occurs in my own life, spells out a particular reconfiguration of my possibilities and brings me closer to an ‘unanticipated future’ that makes sense for me specifically. Following Claude Romano’s evential hermeneutics, the event concentrates the following aspects:

Accordingly, then, to experience the epidemic as a life-event is a profoundly original phenomenon. Societies can prepare for an epidemic and can make use of historical insight to do so. Nothing can prepare a person for living through the event. Elizabeth Rourke, a US medical doctor who wrote about her personal experience of the pandemic, remarks in her reflection: ‘I never saw this coming when I went into medicine’ (Rourke, 2020: 2185).

The epidemic considered as a life-event is constituted in the reconfiguration of possibility that is referred solely to its arising. Consider, for instance, a person who changes profession due to the way they are influenced by the COVID-related epidemic, choosing to enter the healthcare sector. Conversely, think of someone impacted by long COVID who cannot return to a job they loved and saw as part of their identity, or someone who may have lost the opportunity for life-altering medical treatment due to the pandemic’s impact on medical services. For the people involved in those cases, what led to their situation – such as strained services, social and working conditions, specificities of disease susceptibility, specific infectiousness conditions in their area of living – is relevant, but never sufficient to fully account for their experience.

Many other life-events can be recognised as well that can be linked either to infectious conditions or to the living conditions that the infection introduced, such as quarantine and isolation. Again, the frameworks that explain the necessity of these living conditions can never account for the ‘why’ of the personal event. Those who experience the infection as a life-event can neither anticipate nor prepare for it. In Romano’s words: ‘the event of an illness, as it happens unsubstitutably to an advenant by reconfiguring his essential possibilities, his world, and by bringing him to understand himself differently, is rigorously without a why and happens “because it happens”. It is itself its own origin’ (Romano, 2009: 58).

That the event happens ‘unsubstitutably’ to someone denotes the dynamic relation between event and the one who goes through it (the ‘advenant’ in Romano’s words). Specifically, that meaning is created in the interaction between event and ‘advenant’. Event, then, is no effect or aftermath: something that impacts upon and changes an already formed and stable self. Romano posits that events give us our biography in that what happens to us singularises us. To illustrate the point, not all those who suffer from long COVID traverse the same event. This is due not only to the diverse clinical manifestations of the condition, but also to the different histories of those who suffer from it; differences that were shaped by the events that shaped those different histories themselves. That is, each advenant, to use Romano’s term, arrives at the long COVID event having traversed different other events in their own personal history. The long COVID event spells a specific reconfiguration of possibility that makes sense to each one in particular. Hence, unlike epidemicity, we cannot speak of a group event, not even one rooted in a common medical context. There is commonality in such experiences, but not necessarily sharedness.

The life-event defines its own temporality. Events, as posited by Romano, are instantiated according to what has already transpired and with the full cargo of the possibilities they carry. In this case, life-events transpire according to the already proclaimed epidemic and instantly reveal the future they spell for each advenant. This evential ‘future’ is neither consequence nor aftermath. It is not a matter of time difference, but a qualitatively different ‘after’ that is assuredly perceived exactly as the event arises. Rather, it is the arising of the event. This future is truly authentic, as nothing prepares for it, or anticipates it, other than the event itself. What is more, though not precisely correlated to the unfolding of the epidemic itself, the evential future is rooted in the factual occurrence of the event itself and, as such, is separate from a collective epidemic past.

The life-event is essentially an interpretative act, in light of which the advenant reaches a different understanding of themselves and, as such, cannot be captured in quantitively defined time. For this reason, the life-event does not correlate to the development stages of the epidemiological occurrence. This is the reason why people experience lapses between formal announcements and their own personal realisations. Elizabeth Rourke, for instance, describes how she went from a point where ordinary life remained uninterrupted, to seeing fewer patients in the first weeks of March 2020 and finally the moment she understands everything as ‘changed’ (Rourke, 2020: 2184). This lapse is also discernible in the many references to the ‘old life’, the life before COVID, that abound and are being used not retrospectively, but as the pandemic unfolds. In Rourke’s account, for example, ‘I never saw this coming’ is complemented by reflection on the already changed self: ‘[M]‌y old life, 2 weeks ago, feels like it happened to another person’ (Rourke, 2020: 2185). Realisations such as the one cited by Rourke above, are not externally imposed. The intelligibility of the life-event is truly unmediated.

In sum, then, we can identify life-events as phenomena of profound originality, of unmediated intelligibility and of no established form – though not form-less. The originality of the event means a stark difference is created between its arising or its absence. This difference derives solely from the event. Those who experience the epidemic-as-event are confronted with ‘futures’ of reconfigured possibility. These futures are to be found in the interpretative function of events: in their capacity to present us with different articulations of possibility within our life, whether these have positive or negative valence, and lead us to redefine ourselves. In this respect, we must refine our notion of people experiencing different durations within the unfolding of a main social drama. To experience the epidemic-as-event is not a question of different rhythm but of a different sense of immediacy. It is not witnessing the ‘progressive revelation’ of Rosenberg’s drama, it is an immediate recognition of changed possibilities. It is to be ‘entangled into what is unfolding’ but in an individual rather than a collective manner. It is to acknowledge that people live through profound change irrespective of how epidemicity itself develops or concludes.

Co-presence and contemporaneity

Not everyone experiences the epidemic as a life-event. This is true for any given geographical setting, whether the memory of past epidemics is still vivid or not. The event-ness of the epidemic does not rest on originality in the sense of being novel or unprecedented. Event-ness itself, as defined by Romano, does not depend on a firm subject, an experiencing self, who gives meaning to what occurs in life. Rather, it is co-produced in an interaction between advenant and event. In turn, this signifies that even people who have gone through epidemic cycles, or have experienced them as ‘trend’ may also experience one of these cycles as life-event, in the sense described here. More than that, it means that as we go through the current pandemic, and as we slowly and uncertainly move away from it, various individual versions of it have been, and are, co-present. There are people who grapple with the newly revealed futures of life-events, but these are also as dissimilar to each other as are the histories of the people experiencing them. This is because these histories, in turn, are produced by the sum of events in those individual lives and how these have shaped the advenant of this particular life-event. This may also signify an advenant who has already experienced a previous epidemic, or epidemics, or other life-events. By contrast, there are people who experience the epidemic as not eventful; neither original nor revealing.

It is then useful at this point to return to the concept of epidemic occurrences as ‘nested’ into one another as Lachenal and Thomas propose, but with certain modifications. The authors reached this description thinking of the recurrence of epidemics within a geographical region. However, we argue that it is not absolutely necessary for actual epidemics to occur in order for the epidemic past to be co-present with the unfolding epidemic. It can be made present through exegesis and the attempts at interpretation of the experience. The collective epidemic past may become ‘nested’ into the epidemiological occurrence through the authoritative texts that make up the genre of ‘plague’ writing, or may be raised through data comparison with epidemics of the past, or through the anticipation of the regularised stages of the epidemic. What is also ‘nested’ within epidemicity is the potential for epidemics-as-life-events. It is important to recognise the co-presence of those elements. It is also important, however, to distinguish between co-presence and contemporaneity.

To reiterate, epidemics materialise in an epidemiologically defined fact. Their actualisation as significant occurrences carries with it certain contextual elements that have been established intellectually through a combination of historical experience, historical insight, information, stories and comparative thinking. This, in a sense is the en-present-ment of an epidemic past. At the same time, the experience of an epidemic, or of several cycles of epidemics, always carries with it the potential for epidemics-as-life-events. These manifestations of the epidemic phenomenon are not exactly contemporaneous to each other. As illustrated above, contemporaneity between the social fact of the epidemic occurrence and the personal life-event is not possible as the event occurs according to its own temporality.

Recurrent epidemic outbreaks, and the way these may bring the epidemic past into being, may establish familiarity, but not contemporaneity. This is because meaning is created through the interaction between event and the one who goes through it. Even if an occurrence is unoriginal and unrevealing – in other words a non-event in Romano’s terms – the difference between a past selfhood and a current selfhood, as this is shaped by the traversing of events, means also the clear apprehension of difference in terms of temporality. This is perhaps the most distinguishing insight that philosophy can afford us into the experience of epidemics. If we are to acknowledge the historicity of epidemics – their ‘palimpsest-like structures and temporalities’ (Lachenal and Thomas, 2020: 671) – we must also acknowledge how this may obscure the dynamic between events and those who go through them. Unlike the receptive nature of a palimpsest as medium, as surface that captures change without changing in itself, the bodies and selves that go through epidemics change constantly through events. Appreciating this helps account for change in the lives of people who go through an epidemic that does not derive from the particular way they are emplaced in the social drama – their social position, their health status, their vulnerability – but from their own capacity as evential beings.

Conclusion

Describing epidemics as social drama is not an obsolete analogy. It is a useful tool in understanding epidemics as long as we are conscious of its inherent limitations. What we need in order to understand the epidemic phenomenon is to attain to its complexity through a layered framework of thought that can include the multiplicity of experiences that characterise it. This framework has to include multiple senses of ‘event’ because this thought can alert us to different aspects of originality and thus to different ways of making meaning. Historical insight can alert us as to the commonality and the tropes of our experience. Philosophical insight can provide us with the language with which to express its uniqueness and distinctiveness. Different senses of ‘event’, the choice of describing it as ‘bounded’ or not, as defined epidemiologically or as seen in other disciplines, will allow the multiplicity of perspectives that we need. It will also afford us insights into the temporality(ies) of the phenomenon, which beyond being described as complex, are a major part of what differentiates the experience for those who supposedly live through it simultaneously. The closed, dramaturgic model proposed by Rosenberg, the open models that came to revise it, and the self-referential model of Romano, taken together, reveal what is characteristic about epidemics: they are neither ordinary (or normalised as endemic disease, for instance) nor extraordinary in themselves. Rather, they oscillate between ordinariness and originality. This carries capacity for different kinds of hermeneutics. To return to, and revise, Rosenberg’s definition, an epidemic is both ‘events and a trend’. In light of this, there is not a given ‘collective we’ that can reprise normal life after the end of an epidemic. A ‘collective we’ needs to be constituted out of collective stories; constructed by facts, the broader socio-cultural contexts in which these facts occur, and our interpretation of them. A crucial place into this interpretation must be afforded into how one’s life-story is shaped when traversing the experience of a life-event.