When the “great pestilence” took hold in the mid-fourteenth century, in the worst-hit areas it killed up to half of the population. The people of medieval Europe had no such luxury.
We know how to treat the symptoms of those infected with the virus and how to test for it.
We know about virus particles, transmission, and infection rates. For one thing, today we understand what we are up against. “We came through the Black Death, we’ll get through this too.”īut we should exercise caution before drawing too many historical comparisons between these pandemics. In the midst of our own unprecedented global pandemic, mass quarantine, and international lockdown, looking back to this biological disaster seems to offer some small crumb of comfort.
As the world continues to battle coronavirus, allusions to the bubonic plague of medieval Europe are cropping up all over the place.
