The United Nations has confirmed that the recent outbreak of illness in China is not Hantavirus. British health authorities, ever vigilant, maintain their watch. One might ask: why the panic?

Why the rush to diagnose a plague where none exists? The answer lies in our collective psyche, a symptom of a society that lusts after catastrophe. We are the heirs of Gibbon’s Rome, but our barbarians are invisible, our coliseum a digital arena.

The Victorian faith in progress has curdled into a morbid fascination with collapse. We see a few cases of fever and imagine a Black Death. This is intellectual decadence, a failure of nerve.

Our ancestors faced smallpox without Twitter; they endured. Now we demand certainty from institutions that can only give probabilities. The UN’s ruling is a cold shower for the fevered brow of the internet.

Let us hope it tempers our appetite for apocalypse. But I suspect not. The next virus, real or imagined, will find us equally eager for the end.