I hate to burst bubbles - but Covid19 is NOT our 100-year pandemic. The 'Spanish Flu' of 1918 took approximately 5% of the global population. If Covid19 were to do the same we would be looking at 3 million dead in the UK alone. Not even worst-case left-to-its-own devices calculations would put Covid19 into that league. Most estimates suggest 400,000-600,000 without treatment, restrictions or vaccine.
Covid19 appears to kill between 0.5 and 1 per cent of those infected (source, FullFact). In this circumstance we must learn smart lessons from Covid19 - as our best preparation of the 100-year pandemic which may be yet to come - with an order or magnitude greater threat to life.
The good news is, humanity is a quick study. When we understand the causes we do change. We must change.
There are a world of breath-holders who remain hopeful that we will be going 'back to normal'. First by last Easter, now by next... or then again perhaps October. The reality is we will never go back to normal. Not if we are smart. I know you have heard this many times, but let's put some meaty evidence from history on to this particular bone.
Behaviour changes as a result of epidemics and pandemics.
Europe's Black Death killed many millions. But it's long term effect was to change the way society was organised. Too little labour to work the fields led to the emergence of regular pay for farm workers and an increase in wages for artisans and peasants, impacting what had been a rigidly stratified society. No coincidence that the story of Dick Whittington's rise from poverty to Lord Mayor of London arises at that time.
Cholera and associated waves of disease that followed industrialisation and urbanisation led to entirely new sanitation methods. Where once it was normal to sling faeces out of your bedroom window, we learned to embrace a new future-facing normal rather than go back to all that...
The following - from an interview in the New Yorker with Professor Frank M Snowden about his book Epidemics And Society - makes the point that the way we organise and live is key to the epidemics we endure.
"Disease outbreaks have shaped politics, crushed revolutions, and entrenched racial and economic discrimination. Epidemics have also altered the societies they have spread through, affecting personal relationships, the work of artists and intellectuals, and the man-made and natural environments.
“Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning...On the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities. To study them is to understand that society’s structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities.”
The lesson for us is clear. Our latest pandemic comes to us by virtue of the way we have organised our massively interconnected, yet deeply economically and socially divided world.
"we need, as human beings, to realize that we’re all in this together, that what affects one person anywhere affects everyone everywhere, that we are therefore inevitably part of a species, and we need to think in that way rather than about divisions of race and ethnicity, economic status, and all the rest of it."
We need to learn fast. We don't have another 100 years.
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