**8. Conclusions**

The COVID-19 pandemic is a socionatural threat that reproduces a well-known danger, that of zoonotic infectious disease. This kind of virus belongs to the category of crowd diseases, and can be associated to human sedentariness rather than to late-modern conditions *per se*. Corona, however, appears in the context of late modernity, and thus it reproduces some of its features—above all, the speed at which the virus has spread globally in a globalized world. Likewise, this particular virus has succeeded in jumping onto humans in the Anthropocene, and this might lead to the claim that COVID-19 is the first disease of this new epoch. Literally, it probably is. However, this pandemic

shares some key features with the Spanish Flu and other past outbreaks, including the global epidemic of bubonic plague known as the Black Death that lasted from 1347 to 1351. If the virus had actually originated in the meat industry, the Anthropocene framework would be more apposite for explaining its appearance and di ffusion. It seems certain, though, that the source is a Chinese wet market, where the relation between humans and animals is anything but modern. The pandemic is thus rather a Holocene risk that remains in the Anthropocene. That said, the latter's conditions make zoonotic spillovers more common due to the human colonization of wet and tropical habitats in which dangerous pathogens abound. Social sciences should thus provide a nuanced view of epidemic risks, including the COVID-19 outbreak, taking the most obvious theoretical associations with a grain of salt and making others, perhaps less conspicuous ones, more explicit.

In this regard, I have argued that it would be a mistake to frame the COVID-19 pandemic as a negative side-e ffect of modernity. As such, zoonotic infections are a pre-modern threat that have survived the advent of modernity, despite the success of the new hygienic and immunological policies implemented in the late 19th and the early 20th century. Given the number of viruses and bacteria that populate the Earth, eradicating zoonotic infections does not seem feasible. Human societies should then focus on minimizing this kind of risk by increasing their association to modern immunological strategies, and at the same time by refining their relation to natural environments. While zoonotic infections have lost virulence, they seem to occur more often due to human penetration into wild habitats and tra fficking with wild animals. Needless to say, the industrial food system should also be criticized, reformed and/or reduced on both health and moral grounds. The emergence of new viruses due to global warming is also a concern. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic is to be explained in a di fferent way—getting it right is a first step toward preventing the next global pandemic.

**Funding:** This text is part of the project Antropoceno: Sostenibilidad y democracia en el nuevo contexto planetario, funded by the Universidad of Málaga.

**Acknowledgments:** I would like to thank to the Editor and Reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declare no conflict of interest.
