We’ve faced worse pandemics, Bronte Gossling
We’ve faced worse pandemics Pathogens, plagues, and pestilences have been around since the bodies that house them.
Bronte
Gossling shows us that COVID-19 isn’t the first global pandemic, and it won’t be the last.
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NCERTAIN AND SIGNIFICANT THOUGH it is, the era of COVID-19 is not unprecedented. It’s not even the first coronavirus (that honour can be given to the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002) — even though unprecedented seems like it will be Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2020.
trade routes developed internationally with advancements in technology, as did pandemics. Disease began changing hands on borderlines alongside spices, silks and sterling. A cough, a cuddle, a congratulations; it’s hard to reconcile within oneself that something so simple, a mere moment in time, has the potential to fracture fragile federations, crucial alliances, stable economies and impregnable ideologies. Yet the social, political and economic structures of humanity are only as strong as the ones that build them, and pathogens have spent hundreds of thousands of years nipping at the heels and slipping through the cracks of any signs of weakness.
Communicable diseases — that is, infectious diseases that are contagious and can be transmitted between sources directly or indirectly — have existed since humans were hunter-gatherers, a lifestyle that started approximately 1.8 million years ago. It was when mankind progressed to an agrarian lifestyle between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago that the world quickly became a petri dish. Petri dishes, however, are easily contained, and variables can be controlled in a lab; epidemics, meanwhile, are no experiment, and newfangled close-knit communities coupled with increased proximity to domesticated animals created ideal conditions for diseases to spread between hosts like never before. When
The world’s first ever epidemic It’s fitting that the origins of the words epidemic, pandemic and panic are Greek, as that’s the site zero of the earliest recorded plague. Thought to be typhoid fever, The Great Plague of Athens began at the height of the city-state’s ‘Golden Age’ in 430 BCE, and spent three years terrorising its citizens. The weakened state of Athens’ army due to the plague is thought to be a contributing factor to Spartan victory of The Peloponnesian War, a war that historians have theorised would have resulted in the expansion of a Greek Empire, like the Romans, had the Athenians won. 42
