Posted on 03/28/2020 3:44:51 AM PDT by Kaslin
My home library has a shelf of books on the history of plagues and epidemics. William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples provides a fascinating epidemiological timeline, from the dawn of civilization through the 20th century.
What this history shows is that microbes have had more effect on the course of human history than all the leaders, tyrants, invasions, political theories, and ‘isms’ combined.
Pandemics have always been with us and will always be with us. We do not float above nature. We are nature -- like all other living things an exquisite assemblage of molecules and cells.
Many of these pandemics started when humans consumed other species as food; these animals were already hosts to these viruses.
Just as happened in the 15th and 16th centuries when Europeans exposed Amerindians in the Western Hemisphere to microbes and viruses for which they had no immunity -- so it is when humans anywhere on earth are exposed to viruses inhabiting different species.
China has now made the eating of wild animals illegal, which may prove hard to enforce. It’s unclear exactly from which animal the COVID virus originated: bats, civets, snakes, pangolins. Horrific as it is to most other peoples around the globe, dogs are on the menu in China and Korea. Which raises profound moral questions beyond the obvious health issues.
In the 14th century, one-third of Europe was wiped out by plague. In 1917-18 more than a hundred million worldwide died from the Spanish Flu.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Historically we had neither the Science, the hygiene, the Health Care , the communications nor the nutrition we have today. Trying to validate a personal opinion about this virus by citing historic date is a massive absurd single grape to orchard full of apples comparison
Total US serious/critical cases as of today’s data: 2,494
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
‘Ron Maxwell’
the same Ron Maxwell that directed ‘Gettysburg’; he makes some good points, but...how long, sir...?
So far the plagues and epidemics of the past laugh at Covid19.
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