Historically, poets have had less to say about pandemics than you might imagine. Hardly any English-language poetry written during successive waves of bubonic plague focused directly on the effects of the disease, for instance, and exceptions often had a purpose external to any we’d normally now ascribe to poetry.
The 14th century monk and poet John Lydgate’s Doctrine for Pestilence (c.1415) is a wonderful example. It was intended to be used for “governance” for treatment. “Fro[m] frutes hold thyn abstinence,” he advises, but eat chickens and drink good wine. I doubt this helped.
