History, and the social and medical impacts of pandemics.

I've collected several readings on the effects of pandemics.

The economic effects are very real and interestingly, dependent on the level of mortality and the groups affected most, often result in upwards pressure on wages. It's simply supply and demand. So many workers died off during the plague years that those remaining could demand higher wages. The short history of each points up the value of those engaged in science and data. John Snow's observations that cholera seemed to be more prevalent around certain wells in London that were contaminated with sewage led to vast improvements in sanitation. (For a terrific book about his work, see Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.) The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has done studies on the economic impact of recent pandemics. See https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2020/03/the-economic-impact-of-a-pandemic/. From an investment standpoint this article is rather bleak. The recent trend of the stock market to go up (its had the best couple of months in many years) while 30 million people are out of work signals the increasing divergence between those who have (and who benefit the most) and those who don't.


https://www.history.com/news/pandemics-end-plague-cholera-black-death-smallpox and also https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/pandemics-timeline

Gina Kolata, excellent Times science writer notes that pandemics end socially and medically. Medically, the disease simply runs out of people to kill and goes dormant or disappears as in the plague of Justinian around 541 that killed about half of the world's population, some 50 million people. Socially, pandemics "end" when people just learn to cope and accept a level of death. Trump, inadvertently, may be arguing for a social end. Just get used to risk. Some will take precautions, other won't. So be it. Death is normal, get over it. The interconnectedness of our world is both a curse and a blessing. Generally, it raises the standards around the world but makes the spread of disease more rapid and virulent in its impact. That plagues follow trade routes is indisputable.

A lesson to be drawn from much of the reading is how important science is in learning about and controlling the disease (as opposed to religion and other superstitions) as well as a global approach contrary to unilateral so strengthening of global institutions is paramount. The eradication of smallpox by the World Health Organization is instructive. If we've learned nothing else from the current pandemic, it is that someone has to coordinate on a national or global scale.

Pandemics can affect societies in many different ways. Some research ** has even suggested that the mass die-off of native Americans in South and Latin American (estimated at 90 million) who died by the millions after contracting smallpox and measles from the Spanish explorers resulted in climate cooling called the Little Ice Age. Massive amounts of land that had been under cultivation reducing CO2 capture now was returned to dense vegetation that absorbed large amounts of CO2.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/health/coronavirus-plague-pandemic-history.html?searchResultPosition=1

Another book, that I just started, discusses the history and implications of microbial ecology. The title is a bit deceptive as Yellow Fever is barely mentioned. Cholera, the Black Goddess, is. Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Co-evolution Of People And Plagues by Christopher Wills (selection here)

Yale has several books as part of its Open Course Series and one by Frank Snowden who developed a course for Yale on epidemics and their consequences highlights pandemics: Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (The Open Yale Courses Series) Some twenty years ago, the US Department of Defense warned: “Historians in the next millennium may find that the 20th century’s greatest fallacy [they had no idea how crappy things would get in the 21st] was the belief that infectious diseases were nearing elimination. The resultant complacency has actually increased the threat.” Snowden argues that pandemics have influenced the course of history as much or more than wars. The emphasis has been on more visible threats like heart disease to the exclusion of preparedness for pandemics. In spite of years of warnings from WHO concerned with the increased mobility and a global economy, countries were woefully unprepared for COVID-19. As early as 1996, Michael Osterholm, the Minnesota state epidemiologist, informed Congress: “I am here to bring you the sobering and unfortunate news that our ability to detect and monitor infectious disease threats to health in this country is in serious jeopardy. . . . For 12 of the states or territories, there is no one who is responsible for food or water-borne disease surveillance. You could sink the Titanic in their back yard and they would not know they had water.” 335 new human diseases have emerged since the development of the polio vaccine in the late 1950s, most of them originating in animals (many in bats). “Their names now run the gamut from A to Z – from avian flu to Zika,” Snowden notes, “and scientists caution that far more potentially dangerous pathogens exist than have so far been discovered.” Yet still, when he finally acknowledged the destructive presence of Covid-19 in his nation’s population, the primary response of the president of the US was one of genuine surprise: “Who would have thought?”

** "Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492" by Alexander Koch. Quaternary Science Reviews Volume 207, 1 March 2019, Pages 13-36