Plagues & pandemics
July 28, 2020
We are in the midst of a pandemic. It is the first one for most, perhaps all of us, but it is not the first one for humankind. There have been pandemics or plagues for as far back as we can see. Some are unbelievable. In 541, the Justinian Plague killed about a fourth of the world population. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed a third of the world’s population. There were three waves of the Spanish Flu in 1918 and 1919. The second, in 1918, (some of our parents were alive then) killed an estimated fifty million world-wide. (In the Excelsior cemetery there are three markers in a row for three local teenagers in the same family who all died in the summer of 1918.) Our times, then, are not unique.
It is and will be difficult to contain and measure the Covid-19 pandemic, for there has been error, denial and folly from the White House to Effie, Minnesota, and we do not know what lies ahead. It is probably not the case that millions will die in a world-wide Covid-19 plague, but we don’t know, and we all should be as cautious and as careful as we can be.