**1. Introduction**

What kind of risk is the COVID-19 pandemic? How can the social sciences help us to understand the rapid spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and its impact across the globe? Which are the available theoretical frameworks for doing so and how well do they apply to zoonotic infections turned global? Is perhaps the Anthropocene, as a brand-new hypothesis about the human impact on the natural world and its unintended e ffects, the most appropriate explanation?

These are the questions that this paper will deal with. I depart from the assumption that despite the spectacular quality of the COVID-19 pandemic, this was neither an unprecedented nor an unforeseeable risk. Natural scientists have been warning for some time now that the presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb [1]. The same fear was expressed in a piece published in *Nature* five years ago, in which the possibility of a human emergence was explicitly formulated as a way to call the attention of public authorities [2]. Even among economists there was someone who alerted, just a month before the outbreak in Wuhan came to be publicly known, about the potentially high cost of a global pandemic to prevent which not much was being done [3].

They were all quite right, although the advantages of retrospection must also be considered. However, pandemics are hardly an unknown historical phenomenon. Zoonotic spillovers, in which an infectious virus jumps from non-human animals to humans, are not new either. It should be remembered that so-called Spanish Flu killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world in 1918–1919, becoming the most globalized epidemic in history [4], and despite having been mostly forgotten, the Asian Flu in 1957 killed around 2 million people all over the world and reduced US economic growth by 10% in the first quarter of the following year [5], whereas the Hong-Kong Flu caused the death of a million people in 1969, including 25,000 French poeple just in December [6]. Later, zoonotic viruses come one after another: the Lassa (1969), the Ebola (1976), the VIH-1 and VIH-2 that cause AIDS (1981, 1986), the Hendra (1994), avian flu (1997), Nipah (1998), West Nile (1993), swine flu (2009), and finally SARS-CoV-2. David Quanmen, a science journalist specialized in the phenomenon, wrote a couple of years ago that the word zoonosis was going to be around for some time now [7]. Just when some historians were labeling the last one hundred years as the pandemic century [8], COVID-19 seems to herald the continuation of an infectious epoch.

Yet there is no single mention of pandemics in the late Ulrich Beck's account of the global risk society, which was published eleven years ago [9]. This omission is shocking, although nobody had noticed it until COVID-19 began its unstoppable global spread. What does this say about risk society theory? Is it just a distraction on the part of Beck, or perhaps viruses do not have a place in his account of the relation between modernity and risk? If that is the case, which other approaches to risk may assist us in understanding pandemics as particular social threats? Such diagnoses matter, because the way in which societies relate to their environments has much to do with their own self-understanding. This resonates with Luhmann's assertion that there exists a strong critical potential in the analysis of the way in which a society confronts misfortune, as the latter makes it possible to see more thoroughly the reverse of their normality [10]. On such occasions, societies resemble the sick body in which a fluorescent liquid is introduced when a tomography is performed—their inner functioning can be briefly observed in more detail.

Hence this paper deals with the ambiguous relation between COVID-19 and modernity. It does so through the lenses provided by the category of risk—including ecological risks and the new theoretical and symbolic framework provided by the Anthropocene. Against the idea that the pandemic is a typically modern event caused by a predatory view of socionatural relations in the context of a capitalistic-driven globalized world, I sugges<sup>t</sup> that the former is a rather primitive threat that has accompanied human populations ever since they have existed as such. Needless to say, pandemics reflect the features of the age in which they take place. In the case of COVID-19, globalization and social acceleration serve to explain its rapid spread as much as the unprecedented swiftness with which the virus has been decoded and a number of vaccines have been announced. In fact, the pandemic is less the result of a *failed* modernity than it is the outcome of a *lack* of modernity. On the one hand, the virus overcomes the species barrier in a country, China, where food security is notoriously lacking and the flow of information is restricted for political reasons. On the other, most Western countries have resorted to rather primitive strategies of contention based on lockdowns and have proven themselves unable to display a data-driven, sophisticated approach to the pandemic.

The article is organized as follows. Section 3 offers an overview of the relation between globalization, risk, and pandemics. Section 4 discusses risk society and the Anthropocene as theoretical frameworks that may help to explain the COVID-19 pandemic. Section 5 employs cultural approaches to risk in order to highlight the di fference between perceived and objective risks. Section 6 deals with the metaphorical dimension of COVID-19, suggesting that this may be the first disease that is perceived as a ffecting human beings as a totality, irrespective of their ethnic or social belonging. Finally, Section 7 suggests the need to rethink global risks after the corona pandemic, so that a more balanced account of the relation between potential threats and materialized disasters is achieved. Section 8 serves as a conclusion.
