“An epidemic has a dramaturgic form,” wrote
Charles Rosenberg in 1989
, “Epidemics start at a moment in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and duration, following a plot line of increasing and revelatory tension, move to a crisis of individual and collective character, then drift towards closure.” Rosenberg’s dramaturgic description has become an important starting point for critical studies of epidemic endings (
Vargha, 2016
;
Greene & Vargha, 2020
;
Charters & Heitman, 2021
) that, rightly, criticize this structure for its neatness and its linearity. In this article, I want to nuance these criticisms by distinguishing between the term Rosenberg uses, “closure,” and its implicature, “ending.” I aim to show how many of the complications ensuing between the different forms of ending imagined may well be resolved by assessing whether they bring closure or not.