“Perhaps we should take a page from our premodern predecessors and recognise that physical and mental hygiene are two sides of the same sociobiological coin. Pandemic diseases, once established in local biomes, can almost never be eradicated, only controlled and lived with, as human societies have done for millennia. But fear and paranoia are equally contagious, and can become pandemics in their own right. In a time of global traumas, it seems only rational to use the power of belief as part of our basic hygiene, too.”