As nations isolate themselves, coronavirus forces us to see we’re more connected than ever

The Thai airline employee handed the passport back with a gloved hand and leaned over the counter, his voice muffled through a surgical mask. “I see you are American, but I have to ask: In the last two weeks, have you been in China?”

In the security line, removing his shoes, a South Asian man emitted a loud cough and hastily covered his mouth as fellow travelers cast suspicious glances. Beyond the checkpoint, a group of British tourists passed around a large bottle of hand sanitizer.

These are nervous days – not just at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, one of the world’s busiest hubs, but around the globe as a mysterious and deadly new virus hopscotches from continent to continent, leaving a trail of infections, quarantines and fear.

It seems a dark fable from long ago, yet it is very much a consequence of our times.

In its invisible journey from the central Chinese city of Wuhan to two dozen countries and counting, infecting more than 24,000 people, the novel coronavirus has been propelled by an air travel network that links people more efficiently than at any time in human history.

This is the world as we have shrunk it. Our money transactions zip through the ether, and our wants and fascinations move with the speed of a tweet.

It is a powerful conceit, bending time and space.

Now a single microbe – probably sprung from bats dwelling in far-off caves – has forced a reckoning and reminded us of the limits of that power. Just as Ebola rose from West Africa, and Zika from Brazil, a virus bearing a sinister name has once again broken loose from obscurity to shake our illusion of invulnerability.

“All these outbreaks underline the ways that the world is more interconnected than ever,” said Mark Honigsbaum, a British medical historian and author of “The Pandemic Century,” a 2019 book about public responses to outbreaks.