When I wrote a story about an epidemic, complete with administrative mismanagement, I hadn't intended it to be immediately relevant to the world the book was released into. (Though, of course, all fictional themes can have metaphorical resonances with contemporary life.) The elite of Rotenek respond to periodic bouts of river fever by "social distancing" -- i.e., by leaving town for their country properties. In Floodtide, a further quarantine measure was to block traffic across the river, in the belief that the source of the disease was the poorer quarters of the city.
