Lawrence Wrigth - "Crossroads" (the New Yorker, July 20, 2020)

Before retreating from Caffa, the Tartar general, Khan Jani Beg, ordered the diseased bodies of dead warriors catapulted over the city walls, in one of the first instances of biological warfare. Panicked citizens took to boats [...] A dozen ships made it to Sciliy, in October, 1347.

Sicilians were appalled to find on their shores boats with dead men still at their oars. Other sailors, dead or barely alive, were in their bunks, covered with foul-smelling sores. The horrified Sicilians drove the ships back to sea, but it was too late. Rats and fleas, the carriers of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the [black] plague, quickly infested the port of Messina. By January, Italy was engulfed. Ships arriving in the Venetian vassal sstate of Ragusa - present-day Dubrovnik - were required to sit at anchor for quaranta giorni, or forty days, which is where the term "quarantine" comes from.

War of the Worlds (series, 2019)

Good adaptation. They do a good job keeping the aliens away from the viewer from the most time (as in, the master aliens, because the robo-dog thingies - with their idiosynchronous but strangely mechanical noises - are just the guard)

Jeff Vandermeer - "The Astronauts"

Enjoyable enough short story of the three astronauts in the world of "Borne".  More mythical and abstract.  Some great sentences, but there seems to be little plot.