While Covid-19 appears to the world’s population to have descended on the planet without any advance notification, in actuality there have been warning signs in more recent times. Some scientists were cautioning that we should expect pandemics to strike at some point in the future, but nobody ever took much notice of them, particularly politicians, who in all societies do not like to act as harbingers of bad news. For them it is all about what they are going to do to improve the lives of their electorates if they are voted into office, not what preparations they will make in the event of some health disaster which they cannot predict.
Furthermore, the last great pandemic, the misnamed Spanish flu of 1918-20, has never lodged in the collective global memory, despite the fact that it killed 50 million people worldwide according to some estimates, and as many as 100 million according to others. It broke out in the last year of the First World War, so perhaps its impact was blunted in the news reports because of that war.
But we didn’t have to remember the Spanish flu to have notice of the shape of things to come. There was the 2003 SARS virus, which began in Guangdong province in China, and whose main impact was felt in SE Asia. In addition, it was brought under control fairly quickly at least partly because it wasn’t as infectious as the present coronavirus, although in a different era it might have proved far more deadly. But because it wasn’t in their region the western developed world soon forgot about it, as it did the MERS outbreak in 2012, which began in Saudi Arabia and spread to a number of countries in the Middle East. As with SARS, there were some nations in the West which saw a few cases brought by travellers, but the region as a whole remained insulated from it.
It is perhaps for this reason that the nations which appear to have been somewhat prepared for this latest coronavirus can be found in Asia, since they had either direct or indirect experience of SARS. These were Taiwan and South Korea.
More unnerving was Ebola, which in its first form appeared in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976, and in subsequent incarnations was to visit various African countries, especially some in the west of that continent between 2014-16. More recently it has shown itself in the DRC again. While this was a cause of more public concern because it was so deadly, in the end, western interest again appeared to wane given the fact that it seemed confined to Africa.
Possibly the world’s worst pandemic was the Black Death which struck Asia, Europe and North Africa reaching its peak in the second-named continent between 1348 and 1350. It was thought by many to have been a strain of bubonic plague which may now be extinct. Whatever the case, it carried off something like 50 million of Europe’s population, which some have estimated to be 60% of the total at the time, although others give the more conservative figure of at least one third. Deaths, however, were not evenly distributed in every territory.
In Asia the most severe outbreak was in Hubei in 1334 where it has been said that even as much as 80% of the population could have died. In the Middle East, the figure usually given is one third.
For all the devastation of the Black Death, it did have beneficial consequences in northern Europe, at least, and England in particular, for the duration of much of the fifteenth century. Land became plentiful, labour was short so wages were high putting the peasantry at an advantage, in addition to which it was no longer possible to maintain a system of serfdom. In other words, it marked the beginning of the end of the feudal system.
The fourteenth century is a long time in the past, however, and there is not much to be learnt from it for us nowadays except in an epidemiological sense. The case of the Spanish flu may be different, since it is almost, although not quite, in living memory. In a general sense economic circumstances after 1918 were not good and got a great deal worse after the great crash of 1929. That said it is difficult to always disentangle the consequences of the pandemic from those of the Great War.
However, researchers have distinguished localised variations within the United States that are informative. They found that the most severely affected areas with the highest mortality rates and where the authorities reacted late, experienced a sharp and persistent economic decline after the pandemic was over. Places where the authorities had intervened early and most aggressively, especially by closing down cities, saw a relative increase in economic activity after the sickness subsided. It is true that since the flu began in the east, cities further west had time to react. But one lesson seems to be that early isolation methods are beneficial.
In 1918 they did not know about viruses, and while they did know about vaccines they experimented with those designed to cater for bacteria which inevitably were ineffective on all the people they inoculated in San Francisco. The Black Death and the plagues which came after it – and even the Spanish flu − came to a halt because of what is now referred to as herd immunity. A modern society simply cannot afford the number of deaths which would follow before that point was reached, and so until we are liberated by a vaccine, the strategy of the most successful nations in addressing the crisis has been a combination of mass testing, contact tracing, lockdown and social distancing. How successful Guyana’s attempt at lockdown will prove to be remains to be seen, but on the mass testing and contact tracing front it is doing very poorly indeed. It seems to lack the administrative capacity to take the necessary steps, a situation which is aggravated by the concomitant political crisis.
Economically, one suspects, when it is over Guyana will not do anything like as well as all the politicians were anticipating. Apart from anything else, on the grand scale of things no economist is prepared to hazard a firm guess about what will happen to the global economy when we finally emerge from this latest pandemic, although all agree that growth will have declined substantially. The collapse in oil prices is a chilling signpost, and inevitably has implications for Guyana. There are those who say this crisis indicates that inequalities both within and between countries will of necessity have to be addressed, but as yet no clear picture is emerging as to what the brave new world will look like. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who played a role in crafting an international response to the 2008-09 financial crisis is arguing for a similar approach now. As yet it has not materialised.
With Guyana in mind there is a different kind of story from the plague era part of which conceivably could hold a small lesson for us, telling as it does how deeply held enmities were buried in order to achieve unity of purpose for the greater good. It is also, it might be added, a story of great sacrifice.
In 1665, London was being ravaged by the plague, and in September of that year a bale of cloth containing infected fleas was sent from there to a tailor in the small village of Eyam. That bale of cloth was eventually responsible for causing the deaths of 260 people in toto in the village, out of a population of perhaps 350 or even 800 – no one is too sure. By early 1666, 42 people had died, and villagers were very afraid, many of whom were planning to flee.
Eyam’s vicar named William Mompesson had other ideas. He was a newcomer who was immensely unpopular, because he had replaced the community’s previous rector Thomas Stanley. The villagers and Stanley had supported Cromwell and the Puritans presumably throughout the Civil War and certainly afterwards, while Mompesson had been placed there by a restored monarchy with different religious ideas. As it was, his predecessor was evicted from the rectory and went to live on the village outskirts. Mompesson thought it his duty to prevent the plague spreading to nearby towns and villages, and decided Eyam should be quarantined.
He knew he could not persuade the villagers without Stanley’s intervention, but even although they were at odds, Stanley still agreed to help him and at a joint meeting the inhabitants were talked into it. A “cordon sanitaire” was then established around the village, with no one allowed in or out, and remarkably the villagers observed it. The village records hold some extraordinary stories, such as that of Elizabeth Hancock whose husband and six children all died, each of whom she dragged out on her own to bury in a field. She was watched by the inhabitants of a neighbouring village standing on a hill, who were too scared to go and help her.
The lockdown, as we might call it nowadays worked, because neighbouring communities escaped the plague. The sacrifice aside, it was a seventeenth century story of what can be achieved by cooperation in a crisis.
