Albert Camus dedicated a remarkable book to it. And with that as an excuse, this is a journey through the ravages of the plague throughout human history.
Reading through the history of these plagues makes you realise how lucky we were with Covid. The numbers involved in some of these pandemics are just so insane it's hard to get your head round.
Sometimes I wonder what would have been the output of Covid if it had happened 50 years earlier, or 80 years earlier. I presume that the transmission would have been slower, but also the reaction time of society and states would have been way slower. And also vaccines, what would have happened with no vaccines at all?
I am not sure if we were lucky, or we just did somehow the right things. I just hope that I don't have to experience this ever again.
Yeah I think aerosol transmission would always spread faster than physical contact, so covid was a lot more transmissible than the Black Death plagues, but we did have an understanding of germ theory which those older societies lacked. I wonder how many lives could have been saved if people had made washing their hands a habit? But I think our biggest source of luck was just the death rate - I think at it's absolute worst, the case fatality rate was barely above 5% at the beginning of the pandemic, whereas they reckon Black Death was like 50% or something. If that happened now with our increasingly specialised societies you might see something like civilisational collapse at that rate.
Reading through the history of these plagues makes you realise how lucky we were with Covid. The numbers involved in some of these pandemics are just so insane it's hard to get your head round.
Sometimes I wonder what would have been the output of Covid if it had happened 50 years earlier, or 80 years earlier. I presume that the transmission would have been slower, but also the reaction time of society and states would have been way slower. And also vaccines, what would have happened with no vaccines at all?
I am not sure if we were lucky, or we just did somehow the right things. I just hope that I don't have to experience this ever again.
Yeah I think aerosol transmission would always spread faster than physical contact, so covid was a lot more transmissible than the Black Death plagues, but we did have an understanding of germ theory which those older societies lacked. I wonder how many lives could have been saved if people had made washing their hands a habit? But I think our biggest source of luck was just the death rate - I think at it's absolute worst, the case fatality rate was barely above 5% at the beginning of the pandemic, whereas they reckon Black Death was like 50% or something. If that happened now with our increasingly specialised societies you might see something like civilisational collapse at that rate.
Also thanks for the shout out!