An important part of anthroposophic medicine is thinking about why we get sick, even with the COVID19 illness. That consideration does include aspects like routes of exposure (respiratory droplets, coming into contact with contaminated surfaces) as well as knowing when someone can most easily spread an infection (once your fever has been gone for three days you are no longer considered contagious). Those aspects are real and lend quantifiably information we can study through testing and epidemiologic models. Those are the outer parts of the illness and they deal with the quantifiable parts of the illness. But there are other levels of illness which have more to do with patterns of symptoms and patterns of consciousness and try to understand the qualities of the illness. Why are we getting this illness? Those pieces can tell us something about the “being” of an illness. Pandemics are unusual because everyone around the whole world experiences the same illness process at the same time. Pandemics have more of a relationship to the experiences of a particular time than to the conditions of a certain place. They are different than working to understand the health history, illness inclinations, or biography of an individual person.