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‘God preserve us all’: Samuel Pepys and the Great Plague (2015)
- verytrivial 7y agoBTW the name is pronounced "Peeps", peeps. I had it wrong for decades.
- Luc 7y agoThere's a book, which I can't find at the moment, which describes how some in the family pronounced their name 'Peppis', but Sam preferred 'Peeps'. I had a 'Pépin' in my family (French given name), which apparently is what Pepys is based on.
- rsynnott 7y ago"It's pronounced BOUQUET!"
- mathieuh 7y agoFor non-Brits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_Up_Appearances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_Up_Appearances Dunno if this is known outside the UK
- RLN 7y agoIt's very well known in some areas of Europe, from Wikipedia: "Keeping Up Appearances was a great success in the UK, and also captured large audiences in the US, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. By February 2016, it had been sold nearly 1,000 times to overseas broadcasters, making it BBC Worldwide's most exported television programme."
- ThomasBHickey 7y agoYup
- robin_reala 7y agoIt’s in the introduction to the ten-volume 1890s edition.
- rsynnott 7y agoPepys actually complains about this in the diary at some point, too.
- robin_reala 7y agoIf you want to read more of Pepys (and I highly recommend it) then https://www.pepysdiary.com/ https://www.pepysdiary.com/ is great, and I also did over the course of 14 months a thoroughly produced PD ebook for Standard Ebooks with all of the footnotes added back in that Gutenberg missed: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary
- arethuza 7y agoJust noticed that Audible has the diary in two volumes - 79 hours in total!
- rsynnott 7y agoThis is also fun; the diary in realtime (currently on 1667, so a bit late for the plague): https://twitter.com/samuelpepys https://twitter.com/samuelpepys
- bobcostas55 7y agoThe comments on the Pepys diary website, especially on the spicier entries, are absolutely hilarious.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoIt's good to keep things in perspective. Our grandparents lived through worse than the upper limit of what is projected for this virus. The virus is a terrible thing, and we need to fight, but at least it's not Spanish Flu/The Great Depression/World War II/The Cultural Revolution/...
- tome 7y agoGiven how simple[1] coronavirus would be to solve if people took it seriously and opted to socially distance as much as possible, it's rather sad that we're bounding how terrible it will be by the some of worst catastrophes ever to be suffered by humanity rather than by something like a recession. [1] simple, but not necessarily painless
- rebuilder 7y agoRecessions kill people, too. Suicide rates go up, healthcare suffers, poverty worsens.
- graeme 7y agoAn enormous outbreak seems likely to cause a recession. The economy is people. People get sick and die, the economy suffers.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoIt's almost as if we're incapable of creating a planetary economy that can handle shocks with robustness and resilience.
- graeme 7y agoPeople often harp on this point, but plagues travelled the globe long before globalization. They just moved a bit slower from area to area. But they were quite devastating in less connected ages.
- 7y ago
- redcalx 7y agoYou may also be interested in A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Plague-Year-Observations-Remarkable/dp/B00EQFF6U4 https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Plague-Year-Observations-Rema...
- lihaciudaniel 7y agoHow do I flag something on HN?
- robin_reala 7y agoThere’s a flag button below the title, but you need a certain amount of karma to see it. Is this flag-worthy though?
- Vysero 7y agoWhy are people freaking out about this? The upper end of the mortality rate is 3% imho that's simply not nearly high enough to garner this kind of reaction. Polio had a 30% mortality rate for adults, let's keep some perspective here.
- verytrivial 7y agoYes, perspective matters, so here's another: 3% x number of infections. What fraction of the population were exposed to polio vs what fraction are going to be exposed to coronavirus? It is the product of these factors which is causing the "freaking out" as you call it.
- cheschire 7y agoWhen the German chancellor is declaring 60% of the population will become infected, you start to get a sense of the scale. If you look at just first world nations[0], you're talking a total population of 1.04 billion people. 60% of that is 630 million people. 3% of that 60% is 18 million people that could die just in the first world nations. And that's rounding everything down. 0: https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/first-world-countries/ https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/first-world-coun...
- hef19898 7y agotechnically it is not wrong, after all it is backed by actual, true science. That being said, this estimation assumes that nothing will change, so no working counter measures of any kind. In reality, you have China. They are nowhere near these numbers. In Germany trade show get cancelled, events get cancelled, soccer games take place without spectators, schools close. Quarantine measures will certainly be put in place as well when needed. All this helps to keep infections down and slow the spreading. It worked in China after all. I am no expert on diseaes, but I did my fair amount of number crunching. And that tell me that just taking the current average of deaths and infections, currently somewhere around 3.4%, extrapolate the number of infections worldwide and multiply the two doesn't fly. At the very least you have to brake down the world population by age groups based on the same groups we have specific mortality rates for. doing so already gives you a better picture and a more realistic number. Nobody who comes up with expected fatalities seems to bother to do so. Obviously, that leaves the whole impact of counter-measures out of the equation. it doesn't account for time nor for any regionl clusters of people. Neither does it account for any local shortages due to an overwhelmed medical system for certain periods in certain regions. Or for any steps taken to counter these effects. To properly do so requires a full scale modelling of this thing. unfortunately the numbers are changing quite fast, so building these models is quite ifficult i suspect. You would also have to account for margins of error and the fact that testing is a major influence in any parameter of this model. And testing varies highly between countries. TLDR: The numbers a re a mess, calculation and modelling is difficult and everything is changing daily. Good luck with coming up with any reliable predictions. I would love to see numbers for testing so. Especially how many tests have been conducted by region, how many where positive and how many negative. Ideally over time.
- pbourke 7y ago1665: Plague 1666: Great Fire of London It must have seemed like the world was ending.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoSame with WW1 and the Spanish Flu.