By way of comparison, the death toll in the great London plague of 1665, according to the record of the time (The Bills of Mortality) was 68,596. This number, according to the investigations of later historians, is about half the actual number of deaths from the plague that occurred in the summer and fall of that year. And, again, this was in London alone.
All this happened within the centuries long second pandemic, a period of intermittent bubonic plague epidemics which originated from Central Asia in 1331, which was the first year of what was originally called the Black Death. The bubonic plague killed in all about 25 million people in Europe, almost a third of the continent's population.
On the other hand, the current forecast is that perhaps 70,000 will die from the coronavirus in the entirety of the United States.
Perspective is always edifying.
It was known in 1665, just as it is now, how disease is transmitted from person to person, household to household, and the main remedy was what we now call 'social distancing'. The streets were deserted, businesses closed, fortunes ruined as people hunkered down in their own homes.
For those homes wherein a member of the household was afflicted with the plague, watchmen were set, one at day, one at night, to enforce isolation of the entire household. No one went in, no one came out. Or that was the rule, anyway. There were, however, many cases wherein people managed somehow to slip away unseen or indeed issued forth violently, overpowering the watchman. They did not like being constrained, told what to do, having their personal freedoms compromised.
Sound familiar?
Well, there is much that sounds familiar in reading Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. We've been here before, folks, only more so.
All this happened within the centuries long second pandemic, a period of intermittent bubonic plague epidemics which originated from Central Asia in 1331, which was the first year of what was originally called the Black Death. The bubonic plague killed in all about 25 million people in Europe, almost a third of the continent's population.
On the other hand, the current forecast is that perhaps 70,000 will die from the coronavirus in the entirety of the United States.
Perspective is always edifying.
It was known in 1665, just as it is now, how disease is transmitted from person to person, household to household, and the main remedy was what we now call 'social distancing'. The streets were deserted, businesses closed, fortunes ruined as people hunkered down in their own homes.
For those homes wherein a member of the household was afflicted with the plague, watchmen were set, one at day, one at night, to enforce isolation of the entire household. No one went in, no one came out. Or that was the rule, anyway. There were, however, many cases wherein people managed somehow to slip away unseen or indeed issued forth violently, overpowering the watchman. They did not like being constrained, told what to do, having their personal freedoms compromised.
Sound familiar?
Well, there is much that sounds familiar in reading Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. We've been here before, folks, only more so.
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