It is difficult to imagine the magnitude of loss humanity could have faced assuming the outbreak of Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes covid-19, happened in 1500, when, as Yuval Noah notes in Homo Dues, people lived their lives knowing that some infectious disease would annihilate them in one swoop without being able to do anything.
Covid-19 had infected 645 million people and killed 6.64 million others as of December 3, 2022. This would not have been the case three centuries ago. Take the case of “black death” that started in 1330s, around central Asia.
From Yuval’s account, a flea-dwelling bacterium called Yersinia pestis infected humans bitten by the fleas. In less than twenty years, the plague had spread all over Asia, Europe and North Africa.
Between 75 million and 200 million people are believed to have died. In England alone, human population dropped from 3.7 million to 2.2 million people.
Apart from mass prayer meetings and processions, which clearly didn’t work, people were defenseless.
Like other diseases that erupted at that time, “black death” was blamed on angry gods, malicious demons or bad air. “People readily believed in angles and fairies but they couldn’t imagine that a tiny flea or a single drop of water might contain an entire armada of deadly predators”, writes Yuval.
But “black death” isn’t the worst plague that has beset humanity thus. A small Spanish flotilla that left Cuba for Mexico on the afternoon of March 5, 1520, carrying 900 Spanish soldiers and a few African slaves would become the source of smallpox virus. By December of that year, the virus had killed an estimated eight million Mexicans.
Population of Mexico dropped to less than two million people 60 years later as a result of deadly waves of flu, measles and other infectious diseases. When “doctors” and priests were consulted, they advised prayers, cold baths and other strange remedies like smearing squashed black beetles on the sores.
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Excessive religiosity didn’t solve the situation, again. Remember this was at the tail end of middle age when popes still ruled Europe and the Pharaohs could still lord it over the Egyptians.
People died like chicken in tens of thousands because of lack of medical intervention. The “Spanish flu” of 1918 infected, within a few months, a third of the global population –some half a billion people.
The First World War killed at least 40 million in four years; the “Spanish flu” killed between 50 million to 100 million people in less than a year. You get the picture?
Today, unlike with the 1330s folks, we can rely on a vaccine or treatment to stamp out deadly diseases. We’re lucky, in a sense, Covid-19 pandemic struck in this day and age of scientific revolution.
At least 1.17 per cent of the world population – some 91.6 million people – had been fully vaccinated against Sars-cov-2 by March 18, 2021.
Just three decades ago, HIV was a death sentence; doctors debated if patients were even worth saving. Today, an African man (HIV disproportionately affected Africans) is more likely to die from malaria or TB than HIV, thanks to recent milestones in medical research.
