Comparing Covid 19 with the Great Plague?

When Covid 19 announced to the world its grim arrival in late 2019 with dreadful manifestations, people started to compare it with the Great European Plague. The reason is in both cases victims’ condition deteriorated fast and they succumbed before they could be given proper treatment. The speed at which both the diseases spread and victims died showed uncanny similarity hence prompting people to compare them.

Brief history of Plague

The intelligentsia in this country have read extensively the history of the Great European and Asian Plague of the middle age, specifically that of the mid 1300 AD. The scourge continued for about 50 years. Entire Europe was devastated by the Black Death that killed nearly 25 million people, which is almost one-third of the entire population of Europe. Plague, as it is commonly called, is a bubonic plague that arrived in Sicilian port of Messina in October 1347, on board some ships loaded with cargo of different description. It was caused by a type of flea that stuck to the hair of large sized rats. Sailors of the ships were found covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities immediately ordered the ships out of the harbor. But the disease had already gone to the land as the rats jumped ship. Over the next five years, the Black Death unleashed an orgy of death as there was no medicine to fight it.

Interestingly, many European countries were aware of some unknown diseases called ‘Great Pestilence’ wreaking havoc across the trade routes of the Near and Far East. The pestilence had already struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.

According to one source, the bubonic plague is known to have originated in Asia over 2,000 years ago and spread across the seven seas by trading ships. But some other sources claim it was existing in Europe even in 3000 B.C.

It is believed that the famous short story The Pied Piper of Hamelin was inspired by the infestation of cities by rats during the Plague.

Social Distancing and Quarantine observed to Fight the Black Death

The plague raged on with full vengeance and in a bid to contain it authorities everywhere kept the arriving sailors in isolation for certain days not allowing them to mingle with people. Thus, social distancing and quarantine helped to slow down the spread of the disease. In many European counties, villagers erected high walls around the village overnight to fend off men and women suspected to be carriers.

Plague and Covid 19: God’s Punishment?

When humans find no medicine, no treatment regimen and no relief against killer disease, the natural tendency is to look up towards the heavens for divine intervention. People of every religion start to pray to their own gods and organize various types of rituals to pacify the angry elements. It happens because people do not understand the biology of the disease. As a result, many people start to believe that the Black Death or Covid 19 came as a kind of divine punishment for greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness.

History shows that in extreme cases, people also blamed some members in society, like heretics or members of minority community, old women, and men and women with mental illness for their misfortune and incited mob violence against them.

Unfortunately, the frenzy led to the massacre of thousands of Jews in 1348 and 1349. And thousands more fled to regions of Eastern Europe, where they could be relatively safe from the rampaging mobs in the cities.

The difference between Covid19 and Plague is that in the case of Covid 19, a specific type of deadly virus attacks various organs in humans and destroys the lungs hereby hastening death. There is no single drug identified yet to kill the virus and antibiotic does not work against it. On the other hand, in case of Plague, public health experts identified a bacterium named Yersinia pestis. Humans get plague after being bitten by a rodent flea that is carrying the plague bacterium or by handling an animal infected with plague. In both cases, quarantine for possible patients for minimum 14 days and maintaining social distancing work to minimize the spread.

Shahnoor Wahid is the Associate Editor at The Business Post