Post-Covid-19: the world is facing a hunger pandemic and other disasters of biblical proportions

Rereading Exodus, I see eerie parallels with today. The first plague was water turning into blood: we now see deep red algal blooms in the seas off Hong Kong too often for comfort. Then, plagues No 2 to No 4 were frogs, lice and flies – with locusts eventually arriving as plague No 8.

Today we watch gruesome BBC footage of billions of locusts sweeping across East Africa, into Pakistan and India, with fears they may invade 60 countries and 20 per cent of the world’s land surface. China’s Forestry Ministry is on high alert, where they say locusts already destroy an estimated 10 million hectares of crops every year.

Plague 5 was pestilence of livestock: today we have hundreds of millions of pigs culled in China, victims of African swine flu, and billions of farmed shrimp succumbing to Decapod iridescent virus 1, or DIV1, across 11 Chinese provinces, on top of the almost annual cull of chickens downed by avian flu.

And let’s throw in the bacteria and fungi cutting a swathe through Europe’s olive orchards and the world’s Cavendish banana plantations, as well as the collapse of honey bee populations.

Plague 6 was boils, and here perhaps we should not be too literal, though given a choice between boils and coronavirus, Ebola or other recent epidemics, I think the Egyptians got off lightly.