The world shut down in 2020 for the first time in 700 years due to a plague. A novel virus out of China was threatening mass fatalities among the human population. The closure had immeasurable economic, political and social consequences.In States of Panic: COVID-19 and the New Medieval, journalist and author Brian Pottinger examines the reasons for this extraordinary act of self-immolation and comes to a chilling conclusion: the threat was never the virus, it was the humans.In a readable and incisive style, the author explodes one by one the great myths of this tragedy: the severity of the virus; the integrity of the official statistics; the efficacy of total lock-downs; the quality of the science; the wisdom of the political leadership and the competence of the media.He finds neither conspiracy nor malice in this bizarre story: only powerful and unaccountable institutions, the institutions of fear, pursuing power, privilege, publicity and profit by doing what they have always done, exploiting a crisis.This time, however, they created our new medieval. And the world will never be the same again.Brian Pottinger is a South African based journalist and author with extensive experience of developing world societies. He was educated at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Harvard, where he was a Fellow of the Nieman Foundation. He is a former Editor and Publisher of the South African Sunday Times. This is his eighth non-fiction work.