In 1927 an article in The Manchester Guardian gave a wry account of the public acceptance of germs:

When I first read this article in December 2019, I relished its sardonic description of life in an age of germ consciousness. It depicted a microbiological reality to which we, as much as The Manchester Guardian’s presumed readers, had adapted and to which we were mostly inured. By April 2020, however, when responses to the Covid-19 pandemic had caused countries across the world to declare states of emergency, shut all but essential services and insist on social distancing or complete isolation, and a new era of anxious hygiene had been ushered in, the irreverent acceptance of 1927 and 2019 seemed remote, and almost shockingly blasé. Covid-19, like the influenza that caused the 1918–19 pandemic, is a virus rather than a bacterium, but our new awareness of a virulent ‘germ’ of infection has caused us to view the world, and our contact with people within it, through heightened senses of omnipresent threat. We are having to learn about invisible transmission and the seeds of contagion all over again, and modify our behaviour to prevent devastating loss of life. Our new understanding of what we touch and how we protect ourselves places us – tragically – in a unique position to understand what it was like when the world first learned about germs, and how modernity adapted to them.