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From restrictions on hugging your grandmother or your elderly parents, for fear of infecting them, to wearing a face-mask in shops, few could have foreseen how coronavirus has turned our lives upside down. Above all, pandemics cause fear. That can breed misinformation or worsen existing divides as people look for someone to blame. In medieval Europe, Jews were often accused of starting the Black Death. Today, with coronavirus originating in China, some hold China or simply people of Chinese origin responsible for the pandemic – even in Australia, as Frances Mao reports.

We also journey to Laos, where, over a decade ago, a 46,000 year old human skull was found in a cave in the Annamite Mountains - the earliest example of modern human remains in the whole of South-eastern Asia. Archaeologists also found evidence that Laos was home to an agricultural civilisation dating back more than twenty thousand years. Now that agricultural heritage is under threat - not from the present but from the bitter harvest of the Vietnam war, as Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent reports.

And in Florida, along with Texas and Arizona, the so-called sunshine state is currently seeing one of the highest rates of Covid19 cases in the whole of the United States. But why are they struggling with it so much? Some doctors say that inconsistent messages about the virus mean residents are confused or even sceptical about the level of threat, something our correspondent Tamara Gil discovered for herself in Miami.

Finally we take you to France, where it’s sometimes said that the French first realized that they were French through their struggles with the English. After centuries of war and peace, the two nations continue to feel a certain ambivalence towards one another. The entente may be relatively cordiale these days, but fundamental differences remain in how the French and the English see, think and even speak about the world: reflected or perhaps even shaped by the very words we use. Our Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield has worked in France for almost half his life and has spent much of that time thinking about what his mother tongue and his adopted French language tell us about the way we see the world.

Contributors:
Frances Mao
Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent
Tamara Gil
Hugh Schofield

Presenter: Caroline Wyatt
Producer: Lizzy McNeill
Editor: Bridget Harney

(Image: A group wearing face masks in front of the Sydney Opera House. Credit Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)