Quarantine and lock-down are essential for stopping the spread of epidemics. International cooperation is needed also for effective quarantine measures. Today, China can teach countries all over the world many important lessons about coronavirus, but this demands a high level of international trust and cooperation. When one country is struck by an epidemic, it should be willing to honestly share information about the outbreak without fear of economic catastrophe – while other countries should be able to trust that information, and should be willing to extend a helping hand rather than ostracize the victim. Secondly, history indicates that real protection comes from the sharing of reliable scientific information, and from global solidarity. In 2019 not a single person was either infected or killed by smallpox. But in the following decade a global campaign of smallpox vaccination was so successful, that in 1979 the World Health Organization declared that humanity had won, and that smallpox had been completely eradicated. In 1967, smallpox still infected 15 million people and killed 2 million of them.
Vaccinations, antibiotics, improved hygiene, and a much better medical infrastructure have allowed humanity to gain the upper hand over its invisible predators. Once scientists understood what causes epidemics, it became much easier to fight them. While medieval people never discovered what caused the Black Death, it took scientists just two weeks to identify the novel coronavirus, sequence its genome and develop a reliable test to identify infected people. Genetics enabled scientists to spy on the pathogens’ own instruction manual. The theory of evolution explained why and how new diseases erupt and old diseases become more virulent. Indeed, when people gathered together for mass prayers, it often caused mass infections.ĭuring the last century, scientists, doctors and nurses throughout the world pooled information and together managed to understand both the mechanism behind epidemics and the means of countering them. Therefore when the Black Death or smallpox came to visit, the best thing the authorities could think of doing was organizing mass prayers to various gods and saints. People believed in angels and fairies, but they could not imagine that a single drop of water might contain an entire armada of deadly predators. Until the modern era, humans usually blamed diseases on angry gods, malicious demons or bad air, and did not even suspect the existence of bacteria and viruses. When the Black Death struck in the 14th century, people had no idea what causes it and what could be done about it. Humanity has been winning the war against epidemics because in the arms race between pathogens and doctors, pathogens rely on blind mutations while doctors rely on the scientific analysis of information. This is because the best defense humans have against pathogens is not isolation – it is information. Despite horrendous outbreaks such as AIDS and Ebola, in the twenty-first century epidemics kill a far smaller proportion of humans than in any previous time since the Stone Age. However, both the incidence and impact of epidemics have actually gone down dramatically. We should therefore have expected to live in an infectious hell, with one deadly plague after another. A virus can make its way from Paris to Tokyo and Mexico City in less than 24 hours. A modern metropolis such as Tokyo or Mexico City offers pathogens far richer hunting grounds than medieval Florence, and the global transport network is today far faster than in 1918. In the century that passed since 1918, humankind became ever more vulnerable to epidemics, due to a combination of growing populations and better transport.
More than the First World War killed in four years of brutal fighting. Altogether the pandemic killed tens of millions of people – and perhaps as high as 100 million – in less than a year.
It is estimated that the flu killed 5% of the population of India. It infected half a billion people – more than a quarter of the human species.
In 1918 a particularly virulent strain of flu managed to spread within a few months to the remotest corners of the world. Yet by December a smallpox epidemic devastated the whole of Central America, killing according to some estimates up to a third of its population. At the time, Central America had no trains, buses or even donkeys. In March 1520, a single smallpox carrier – Francisco de Eguía – landed in Mexico. The city of Florence lost 50,000 of its 100,000 inhabitants. It killed between 75 million and 200 million people – more than a quarter of the population of Eurasia. In the 14th century there were no airplanes and cruise ships, and yet the Black Death spread from East Asia to Western Europe in little more than a decade. Epidemics killed millions of people long before the current age of globalization.
0 kommentar(er)
