The problem with this reasoning is that it misses the key ingredient that might have helped people achieve great things: solitude. Solitude is almost impossibl

The problem with this reasoning is that it misses the key ingredient that might have helped people achieve great things: solitude. Solitude is almost impossible to reach with today's attention economy (mostly social media), people will most likely spend their quarantine watching countless videos on the internet. What the plague removed are distractions, we can't say the same for covid-19, unless you're trained to resist the attention economy, but then you wouldn't need a pandemic to do deep work.