AAEM NEWS FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
People are People Andy Mayer, MD FAAEM — Editor, Common Sense
So how do you spend your COVID downtime? Some of us have been working extremely hard in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Other emergency physicians who work in less affected areas have seen huge decreases in patient volumes or decreased hours and shifts. Even those who are not in hot spots when not working are similarly affected by the bunker mentality, which has been part of our new normal. What do you do instead of meeting family or friends or pursing your previously normal pre-COVID pursuits? I write this at the end of June, but the world may be very different even by the time it is published. We of course hope that this is a temporary issue, but as with all things COVID the truth is that most predictions which have been made during this time have simply been proven wrong. It is hard to be accurate when working from the dark hole, which is COVID. People who know me realize that I like books and intermittently feel the need to read old books and talk about them. One of my personal COVID wellness programs has been to try and increase the time I spend reading in an effort to distract myself from what is going on in the world as the news is often simply too depressing. A positive side effect of this activity was to try and work through that stack of unread books in my office. I also like to read books with my adult children and discuss the books with them to keep in touch. My adult children were all fortunate in that they were able to stay employed, but they also have had more free time as their social lives took a more solitary turn. Everyone is looking for something to fill the hours, which used to be spent in more social situations, so we increased our reading. I saw on my shelf two plague related books and decided to read these. What better time to read about a plague than during a pandemic? This may sound strange, but I wanted to see how people from the past thought about an event like this before humans even knew that a bacteria or virus existed.
IT REALLY SURPRISED ME THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THESE EVENTS REGARDING HOW THE AVERAGE PERSON DEALT WITH THE STRESS AND DANGERS, WHICH WERE PRESENTED TO THEM WHETHER IT BE FROM THE BUBONIC PLAGUE OR COVID.”
The first book we tried was the Decameron, which to be honest I did not like and abandoned about a half the way through. It is really a comedy and deals with a group of young people hiding out in the countryside outside Florence during a 14th century bubonic plague outbreak. It contains a series of humorous and irreverent stories, which the characters take turns telling. It was surprisingly risqué and anticlerical for the 14th century. It is fun but seemed redundant to me. The other book, which we read was Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. This book is set in London during another bubonic plague outbreak, which occurred in 1665. It is a narrative by a man who stayed in London throughout the plague and tells an account of what he saw and read. I did enjoy this book and was amazed by the similarities between people hundreds of years apart in time regarding their thoughts, feelings, and reactions to a threat like a plague. It really surprised me the similarities between these events regarding how the average person dealt with the stress and dangers, which were presented to them whether it be from the bubonic plague or COVID.
One of the first things to strike me were the many “Bills of Mortality” which are present in the book. Defoe details the spread of the plague by parish across London during the year. The various parishes made a weekly report of the number of people who died and often compared the numbers to their normal death rates. It is easy to compare these to the daily charts of positive COVID tests and death by county, state, or country. They too watched the disease spread from one area to another. They also noted small areas with an increased rate of illness suddenly explode with cases. Another fascinating thing was that they quickly realized that many deaths were being misidentified as not being from the plague when they probably had simply not been properly diagnosed. This sounds much like all the talk about “excess deaths” related to COVID in our current world. “The most controversial containment measure ordered by the Lord Mayor’s Office was the policy of shutting up houses. If illness was evident or suspected, the City had the power to sequester a property and shut it up, along with its inhabitants, for a period of one month, or until the virus had passed.” – Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
The government’s response to individuals also warrants some comparisons. The city of London decided to quarantine people at home and required the whole family to stay inside until the family either died or recovered by the end of a month of isolation. This entailed the government hiring a “watcher” who was stationed outside the house to make sure that the family did not try and escape. There was incredible fear related to been “shut up” in a
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