The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright

Author:Lawrence Wright [Wright, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

16

Waves

“I am reflecting on the idea of disease waves,” I said, when Gianna Pomata and I spoke again in May. Despite Vice President Pence’s assertion, scientists were talking about a second wave of Covid-19 in the fall, or perhaps many waves. The 1918 Spanish flu began in the early spring, disappeared in the summer, then returned in the fall. A third wave came in the spring of the following year; after that, the disease retreated, leaving tens of millions dead in the space of a year.

The bubonic plague came in three great pandemics. The first, known as the Plague of Justinian, lasted from the sixth century till the eighth, with few letups, ravaging the Byzantine Empire. The second pandemic, the Black Death, arrived in Italy in December 1347, and spread quickly across Europe. Pilgrims carried it to Mecca. The plague soon infested Scandinavia. A third of the population of Egypt died. Subsidiary outbreaks continued to appear in Europe for three hundred years. The Great Plague of London, which Daniel Defoe chronicled, hit in 1665. After that, the plague mysteriously faded away.

“There was a much more circumscribed episode in Marseille in the early eighteenth century,” Pomata told me, “and that’s it for Europe, but not for Asia.” The last plague pandemic began in the mid-nineteenth century, in China, and spread to India, where it killed six million people. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the disease journeyed to America, where a Chinese resident of San Francisco was the first to die. Henry Gage, the governor of California at the time, tried to play down the outbreak, speculating that white people were immune to the disease; scores died. The plague has never been entirely eradicated, but it may have killed so efficiently that with each wave it starved itself of human hosts. Having persisted in flea and rat populations, the bacterium continues to infect humans from time to time. As many as two thousand cases are reported to the World Health Organization every year, often including a handful in the American Southwest.

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