Until this past year, the terms “face masks”, “pandemics”, “epidemics”, and “quarantine”
did not hold much meaning for most of us, because we had very limited
experience with them. Now, those terms are
easily a part of our everyday vocabularies. On March 11, 2020, the World Health
Organization announced that the COVID-19 virus was officially a
pandemic after going through 114 countries in three months and infecting over
118,000 people. Without a vaccine available, the virus that began in China
quickly spread to almost every country in the world. By December 2020, it had
infected more than 75 million people and led to more than 1.6 million deaths
worldwide.
The ongoing prevalence of the Covid-19 pandemic has caused us to seek more
information on pandemics in general and try to understand what causes them and
the history of major pandemics. As far
as infectious diseases are concerned, a pandemic is the worst case scenario.
When an epidemic spreads beyond a country’s borders, the disease
officially becomes a pandemic. The
mobility of today’s world population can quickly and easily change an epidemic
to a pandemic.
The earliest known major pandemic happened in Athens in 430 B.C. during the
Peloponnesian War and took the lives of two thirds of the population. There have been three major bubonic
plagues. In what is believed to be the
first bubonic plague, the Justinian Plague in 541 A.D. over two centuries
killed 50 million people which was 26 percent of the world’s population. It was
started by rats and carried by fleas.
The Black Death in 1350, the second large outbreak of the bubonic
plague, was responsible for the death of one third of the world
population. It started in Asia and moved
west in caravans. In 1855 the Third Bubonic
Plague Pandemic, claiming 15 million lives, started in China and then moved to
India and Hong Kong. This pandemic was
considered active until 1960 when cases finally dropped below 200.
Affecting many in the United States, the 1918 Spanish flu caused 50 million
deaths worldwide. Within a few months of its onset in the United States,
hundreds of thousands died. At that time, there were no effective drugs or
vaccines to treat this flu strain. In 1919, the flu threat disappeared when
most of those infected either developed immunities or died.
We currently have a display of many books on plagues, epidemics, pandemics,
and Covid-19 at the Al Harris Library.
To gain a better understanding of these topics, come by and check out a
book!