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Nasty thing that. Bubonic plague became famous for killing nearly half the western world in the 14th century in just a few years, but for all its voracious dest
by southernplaces7 1y ago
Nasty thing that. Bubonic plague became famous for killing nearly half the western world in the 14th century in just a few years, but for all its voracious destructiveness, the pneumonic variant left it in the dust in specific situations. I've read that in cities and towns where plague took on its pneumonic form instead of its bubonic variant, 80%+ of the local population would die in just days. In some cities struck by this, populations didn't recover until the 18th century.
- southernplaces7 1y agoI think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale. The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average social group, family or community, one would hear of only a very small minority of people having actually died. It was, comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of pure clinical impact. Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so many years now completely erased from your personal world. All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
- askonomm 1y agoYou should write a book, if you haven't yet. I'd buy it. Love the way you convey emotion with words.
- southernplaces7 1y agoNow that was a wonderful compliment. Thank you.
- Grosvenor 1y agoTry Michael Crichtons "The hot zone". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone There's entire chapters of this: "The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. " Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.
- jameshart 1y agoRichard Preston, not Crichton. Maybe you’re thinking of The Andromeda Strain?
- literalAardvark 1y agoThe Hot Zone was an awesome read. Highly recommended.
- amenhotep 1y agoRecommendation: The Doomsday Book. Connie Willis. Heartbreaking.
- harryquach 1y agoThis reinforces my belief that today is the best time in human history to live. Yes there is still pain and suffering but overall more humans live lives our ancestors could not begin to imagine.
- Waterluvian 1y agoAnd we know this. We can measure it and reason about it. But good times breeds weak people and we’re well into the phase of people no-longer grokking why vaccines, civil government, democracy, floodplain management, etc. need to exist. This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
- deadbabe 1y agoYou can’t fight it, you just endure, and one day you may die but hopefully others will carry on in a better world.
- overfeed 1y agoSame goes for preventative maintenance, handling technical debt or any action that keeps negative consequences at bay. It's a failure mode that's almost an inverse of loss-aversion; some people will start asking "Why are we investing in $ACTION, it seems unnecessary as nothing bad ever happens"
- pixl97 1y agoPeople don't understand why Chesterton's fence exists
- tyre 1y ago> good times breeds weak people This is a silly and regularly disproven trope. For an extensive and approachable start: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
- roywiggins 1y ago> I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale The Black Death was so big that people struggled to comprehend it at the time, too.
- southernplaces7 1y agoExactly that too. Coupled with them living in almost complete darkness about how or why diseases spread, it would have been exceptionally terrifying to behold in a way that a modern person in the middle of a pandemic wouldn't have to face in quite the same way.
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- literalAardvark 1y agoEveryone I know lost someone to COVID. I almost croaked twice to it. Idk where that "small minority" is but it sounds like you might not value your friends very highly. Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold.
- sokoloff 1y agoThe IFR (infection fatality rate: the chance of dying for an individual who contracted COVID) is under 1%. That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.
- literalAardvark 1y agoOne could argue that the plague also has a low kill rate these days. The IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.
- sokoloff 1y agoWhat?! I know hundreds of people who have had it, and only one I know went to the hospital. Zero died. I’ve had it three times. Zero hospital visits. One was “bad cold”; one was “mild cold”; the last was “would have never known I had anything if not for a complete loss of smell, which made me test”. Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
- literalAardvark 1y agoWho said everyone? iirc untreated IFR is around 10%
- sokoloff 1y agoYou did: “IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.”
- hibikir 1y agoIn the middle ages they understood quarantine, but the fact that the disease was carried by fleas made it worse: It'd break containment unless the arrival was by boat, and you didn't let anyone disembark. So even when warned (and people were warned) often the people bringing the warnings could spread the disease anyway.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago> Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
- southernplaces7 1y agoI can imagine, though in the context you describe, the entire terrifying process would have been much slower-moving. Months maybe? I'm honestly curious.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoMy partner's internship was in a hospital, so by the time he saw people they were mostly already acutely ill, so in many cases the decline was pretty quick (though obviously much longer than something like plague). I was more referring to the intense fear and constant undercurrent of death that permeated urban communities of young gay men at the time. As it did mostly affect young men, these were folks who were otherwise in the prime of their lives physically, and then when they got sick the physical wasting in the end was often pretty extreme. And it was made all the more difficult by the fact that society just kinda went on as normal (or worse, argued that AIDS was "killing all the right people").