Not surprising since blood letting and leeches didn’t cure much.
There is good evidence that the Spanish Flu originated in Kansas. Because of WWI, the censors clamped down on any news that might affect morale. Spain wasn’t at war and had no censorship. The first widely reported infection was a member of the Spanish royalty, hence the name.
BTW, other evidence supports an origin in China. Could have been spread by the many thousands of Chinese that served in labor battalions in France.
No one knows...
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
No one in the past took the extraordinary measures we have or had anything approaching our level of medical technology. It would have been a LOT worse if it had happened in the past. Plus, China’s numbers and other countries’ numbers have been significantly undercounted.
The common flu, itself, has been far deadlier than this drama bug.
There was also an epidemic of Asiatic cholera that swept through Europe in 1830 and the US two years later. Although this is a water-borne disease, people at the time thought it was airborne and huge bonfires were set around the perimeter of cities and towns in an attempt to stave it off.
Tuberculosis was also endemic in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century until antibiotics were developed that could treat it.
At the time it was raging through Europe, the bubonic plague was not called the Black Death but the pestilence. “Black Death” is one of those terms that was coined afterwards—like Renaissance (coined by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in the nineteenth century), Industrial Revolution (coined in the twentieth century) and Roaring Twenties (coined in 1939).
The plague of communism in the USSR and PRC is right up there with the worst of microbes in terms of deaths.
Well, actually, the “dark ages” are considered bo be 476-800, from the fall of Italian Rome to Charmalagne. The plague actually occurred in the late middle ages, which are usually considered to be 1300 - 1500.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the 1350s was *NOT* the ‘dark ages’ - which were called such because of the extreme lack of historical records following the dissolution of Western Rome.
This won’t even make the Top 20.
Shouldn’t malaria, measles and polio have made the list? They all seem much more serious than this “Covid 19” oitbreak.
Back in those days diseases were thought to be caused and spread by BAD AIR (Miasma). That is why the Plague Doctors had a beak shaped mask as the beak was full of flowers and perfumes to modify what the doctors breathed.
Another way it was believed diseases were spread was a sick person could cast an EVIL EYE on a well person causing them to also become sick.
Interesting article, but one glaring error. The Black Death did not lead to the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages is a somewhat archaic term given to early medieval period, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. Author was off by 800 years or so, equivalent to the gap from Magna Carta to Brexit.
[Buried Lead.]
Coronavirus deaths: Why NI’s statistics are changing
By Eimear Flanagan
BBC News Northern Ireland | 15 April 2020
(...)
The PHA toll consists of patients who die within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 diagnosis, whether or not Covid-19 was the cause of their death.
(...)
How does Nisra calculate its weekly death toll?
Nisra’s figures are compiled from formal death registrations, a process which can take up to five days.
Its coronavirus-related death toll not only includes patients who have tested positive for Covid-19, but it also includes “suspected cases” in which Covid-19 been mentioned on the death certificate.
In these cases, the patient was not tested for coronavirus, but a doctor completing their death certificate has diagnosed a suspected case based on Covid-19 symptoms rather than a laboratory result.
(...)
Link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-northern-ireland-52291997
“By far the deadliest pandemic of all time, the Black Death radically shaped the course of human history, plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.”
I hate to pick, but the Dark Ages (a/k/a “Early Middle Ages”) lasted from the 5th to the 10th century. The Black Death of 1347 to 1351 occurred during the Late Middle Ages.