Words in Time of Pestilence . . . Plague: Are Allegorical Pandemics Instructive? Albert Camus and Kurt Vonnegut.

The spikes on the outer edge of the COVID-19 virus particles
resemble a crown, bestowing on the disease its potent name.

The Plague (La Peste) a classic existentialist novel that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It poses a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. An allegory of stoic resilience, charged by hope more than faith, the novel charts the challenges faced by individuals unsustained by any communal ideology other than a sense of duty, fellow feeling and the will to live.

La Peste by Albert Camus,

a philosophical novel

published 1947 

ICE-9: An alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature, whose crystals cause all the water in the world’s seas, rivers, and groundwater to turn into ice-nine. The freezing of the world’s seas at once causes illimitable catastrophes from a causal chain driving violent storms and tornadoes that ravage the Earth’s terrain.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, 

a science fiction novel

published 1963

COVID-19: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), previously known by the provisional name 2019 novel coronavirus, is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA (ribonucleic acid) virus. It is contagious in humans and is the cause of the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that has been designated a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization.

Here are some of the most beautiful words in the English language (Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence, 1593) ...

                        Brightness falls from the air, 
                        Queens have died young and fair, 
                        Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. 
                        I am sick, I must die:
                        Lord, have mercy on us. 

Postscript:

One can predict that a catastrophe on the scale of Coronavirus will spawn reflexive cinema and even now developers are in intense conclave in Hollywood. It is said that the movie, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a 2004 drama directed by Mary McGuckian, was a consolatory narrative in response to the 2001 9/11 attack on The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_of_San_Luis_Rey_(2004_film)