Calculable homogeneous spaces of hours, days, weeks, months, and years anchor the facts of infectious disease and their recorded amplification due to our destruction of planetary health. Undoubtedly, successive time divided into repetitious points and periods enables us to get on with things. However, in doing so, it circumscribes modes of thought and practice. In the words of the American Pragmatist William James, the concept of divisible time involves an omission in the connection between things: ‘skipping the intermediaries as if by a divine winged power, and getting at the exact point we require without entanglement with any context.’ Drawing on evidence of the biomedical formulation of COVID-19 and Ebola reveals that the antecedent events leading to an outbreak or those that become its unfinished legacy do not necessarily conform to the image provided by the mechanistic (now digitised) clock. I ask whether holding infectious diseases and those of our ‘civilising’ modes enabling their amplification might warrant thinking otherwise about time.