Sunday, March 22, 2020

Reboot 2020




Perhaps, just maybe, this new and frightening pandemic is here for a reason. Could it be that the universe, in its own way, is telling us that enough is enough?

There have been times in memorial that have ended millenniums and given birth to new growth through the cleansing of the infections that mankind has delivered unto themselves.

There was the Bubonic plague that issued in the renaissance of the Middle Ages. There was the Plague of Justinian.The pandemic is believed to have originated in Africa and then spread to Europe through infected rats on merchant ships. It reached the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in 541 A.D., and was soon claiming up to 10,000 lives per day. It is believed to have killed at least 25 million people, but the actual death toll may have been much higher. And thus the end of an era. 

Enter The Black Death in 1347. 


While the pandemic left much of the continent in disarray, many historians also believe that the labor shortages it caused were a boon to lower class workers, who saw increased economic and social mobility. The Italiait still Plague of 1629-31 killed some 280,000 people, including over half the residents of Verona. The Republic of Venice, meanwhile, lost nearly a third of its population of 140,000. Some scholars have since argued that the outbreak may have sapped the city-state’s strength and led to its decline as a major player on the world stage. 

The Plague laid siege to the city of London several times during the 16th and 17th centuries, most famously between 1665 and 1666. The pestilence first arose in the suburb of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, but it soon traveled into the cramped and filthy neighborhoods of the city proper. At its peak in September 1665, some 8,000 people were dying each week. Western Europe’s last major outbreak of medieval plague began in 1720, when a “mortal distemper” seized the French port city of Marseille. It still spilled over into southern France before finally disappearing in 1722. By then, it had killed roughly 100,000 people. 

The first two major plague pandemics began with the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death. The most recent, the so-called “Third Pandemic,” erupted in 1855 in the Chinese province of Yunnan. The disease traversed the globe over the next several decades, and by the beginning of the 20th century, infected rats traveling on steamships had carried it to all six century, infected rats traveling on steamships had carried it to all six inhabited continents. The worldwide outbreak would eventually claim some 15 million lives before petering out in the 1950s. Most of the devastation took place in China and India, but there were also scattered cases from South Africa to San Francisco. Despite the devastation it led to several breakthroughs in doctors’ understanding of the bubonic plague. 

In 1894, a Hong Kong-based doctor named Alexandre Yersin identified the bacillus Yersinia pestis as the cause of the disease. A few years later, another physician finally confirmed that bites from rat fleas were transferred to humans.

 I’m not saying that this pandemic is any less serious then the plagues of the past. But this time we have a history to learn from. The warning is to be vigilant and wise. But most of all to be strong, and to be kind to each other. We can do this! We have technology on our side if we take advantage of it. We have a wealth of knowledge in the palm of our hands if we use it for good. And we have each other.

Is it finally time for a global reboot?

 

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