In many respects modern society is far more fragile than it was in the past. We have better sanitation, healthcare and abundant food, certainly. Yet almost ever

In many respects modern society is far more fragile than it was in the past. We have better sanitation, healthcare and abundant food, certainly. Yet almost everything we have depends on longer and longer, vastly more complex, supply chains that might spread across multiple countries. During the black death, being pre-industrial, everyone in a town or village was close enough to the land that losing half a population did not leave them clueless. A horse or an ox, a ploughshare, and some people gets things going again. That scale today would have unimaginable secondary consequences and could get impossibly ugly while we figured it out. Most of our manufacturing comes from the other side of the globe. Just in time supply means there aren't barns and warehouses filled with food and spare parts any more. Global travel will spread any epidemic beautifully, long before nations start closing ports and borders. How long could most modern nations cope with closed ports? So if something virulent enough to decimate a population comes along, for which we have no immediate answer, I doubt modern society would cope at all well. Heck, look how badly we coped with BSE - a problem we mostly engineered ourselves through greed and arrogance. We're just remarkably lucky that nothing dangerous enough has come along during the antibiotic age. Hopefully it won't, but eventually it probably will.