corona

Different Pestilences, how they progressed, and evidence of how they died out

1  The Black Death 1300s in Europe

This pestilence came to Western Europe and was particularly virulent.  If you look carefully at the stonework in the Nave of Tewkesbury Abbey, it gradually deteriorates as you go towards the back of the church.  The reason is that the good (and some of the bad) masons were dead.  The doctors were dead, the farmers were dead.  There was no treatment and therefore the death rate was huge, and the curve didn’t flatten out until the susceptible people were dead and buried.  Then the plague disappeared because there were no susceptible people left.  The population were not at all mobile.

2  The Plague of 1665

 Generally the bubonic plague that devastated London in 1665 had a very similarly shaped mortality graph to the Black Death.  Lots of Deaths early on, and when they were all dead, the resistant people survived and the number of dead decreased rapidly.  The final disinfectant in London was the Great Fire of 1666 which burnt down about one third of the City.  Again, the population was not very mobile. The other interesting episode in that plague happened in a village called Eyam in Derbyshire.  A contaminated bolt of cloth from London arrived for the tailor in the village and he got the plague.  The Vicar, the Rev. William Mompesson was very highly regarded by his parishioners and he told them to stay in the village for as long as it took. Neighbouring villagers brought food and left it at the village boundary.  Eyam paid for it with money that was left in a container soaked in vinegar.  This went on for several weeks.  Almost half of the villagers died, but nobody ran away.  Mompesson’s wife died. Whole families were lost.  But two interesting things came from this: The undertaker survived, and no plague broke out at all in neighbouring villages. The undertaker must have been immune, and thanks to the inspiration and trust felt by the villagers for Mompesson, everyone stayed in the village.  Isolation works.

3  The Spanish Flu of 1918 

This was the first recorded pandemic, because by 1918, people were mobile, and many were under orders.  There were no effective drugs, death was commonplace, (although war injuries and TB were more common and more expected.  Huge numbers died because most people were under orders, there was therefore no isolation.  Conditions were appalling - e.g. trench warfare, and not surprisingly anxiety was high.  There was a lot of mobility which spread the disease and made it worse because it lasted longer and affected people over a larger area. These three pestilences had tall but narrow graphs.  The numbers dead/day shot up until the affected patients were mainly dead, and then the graph dived as the fewer and fewer remaining victims died. The graphs, (because they are straight up and straight down) record fairly few deaths, but as they all happen over a short time, they far exceed the level of medical intervention available.

4  The current Corona Virus 2019/20 

There are certain actions which look as though they will be necessary in overcoming this particularly insidious pandemic.  It is particularly serious because it is impacting a mobile peacetime society with little or no personal knowledge of extremely high levels of disease, high unemployment, or anything other than the freedom of peacetime and relative plenty.  We need to take our actions seriously, this is not a game. This is not just a struggle against a disease. It is a WAR. Also, the symptoms of this virus are not as dramatically distinctive as earlier plagues, and the disease is taking place in times when we: go to supermarkets to buy our food, we don’t grow it; we live in a “replace not repair” community, and we take personal transport for granted and have jobs many kilometres from where we live.  Very few people walk from their home to their place of work. We are also used to a great amount of personal freedom.

What we must do medically, as opposed to economically. 

We need to know how many cases there are of corona virus We must test as many people as possible to find out. We need to plot this information to establish the shape of the graph.  “Flattening the line” The least lethal and quickest way to deal with this pandemic is to allow it to kill off all people who are susceptible to it.  Unfortunately this would scar our society as we know it, and completely overwhelm our medical facilities.

If we try to “flatten the line”, by using certain draconian precautions, the graph may get flattened, but in doing so, it will take longer to revert back to zero, and therefore, ironically, more people will be killed than if nothing were done.

Consequences of flattening the line Many businesses will close.  Many people will suddenly find themselves out of their jobs.  Most of us have lost our basic freedoms.  Many of us become perturbed or frightened by our new circumstances.  It is important that to keep money flowing, people need to earn a living wage. This is where we get contentious. 

We are at war with an enemy which we cannot see, and which does not share any of our objectives, other than to reproduce as much as its “food chain” will allow.

Because we are “at war”.  we need to act that way.  Miltary hospitals should become overflow hospitals, preferably away from hospitals where corona virus is.  The armed forces have much they can do.  Where, for instance, are our two new disaster relief ships, HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide? 8000 people are being stood down from one airline alone.  Could some of those personnel e.g. cleaners, have minimum retraining and clean hospitals?  This keeps an income in the family and money flowing which can be spent in businesses that will otherwise close.  On a large scale it would help to steady the stockmarket where “ordinary Mums and Dads”, and “extraordinary Grannies and Granddads” have their super in the form of shares.

PROGNOSIS

At the moment, we have severe restrictions on what we can and can not do.  These will, in time, let’s say three months, give or take, reduce the number of obvious corona virus patients almost to zero.  That would be the end of June. However . . . At a given point, restrictions will be eased, perhaps even lifted.  The coronavirus will come back, because it was never totally eliminated.  The line will go up again, not as high, and then decrease.  As restrictions are eased and tightened and eased again, there will be a “ripple effect” of maybe five cycles.  This would mean that normal life (as we knew it a few short weeks ago) will return in about eighteen months, which will be September 2021.

And I already have an engagement in October 2021!