Plagues or epidemics have hit the human civilizations throughout its history. As per some religious sources, some plagues even wiped out the entire populations. The plague of Justinian arrived in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 514 CE. It spread across Europe, Asia, North Africa and Arabia killing almost half the world’s population then.
The plague, however, came back after 800 years in the form of Black Death in 1347. This one killed almost 200 million lives in just four years. And then came the Great Plague of London. This was actually the Black Deaths plague that was coming back after every 20 years. So in 300 years, it returned to London almost 40 times. But this one that hit it in 1665, it killed 100,000 Londoners in just seven months.
After that, Smallpox hit the world in the eighteenth century. It wiped out 90-95% of the indigenous population in Americas. Cholera, that broke out in 1858 in England killed tens of thousands of English people in a matter of few days. In 1918, Spanish Flu tore through Spain and resulted in the killing of 50 million people.
However, this is not all. There has been the positive side of the plagues as well. To name a few, let us start with the Black Death (1347-1351). In spite of the loss of 200 million lives, it helped people smash the hegemony of Roman Church and other dogmatic, authoritarian institutions. Moreover, it destroyed serfdom and led to many path-breaking labour-saving innovations. Also, this plague helped in the invention of quarantine after the Venetian politicians guessed that the pandemic has something to do with the proximity. Sailors were kept in the ships for 30 days.
Though the Smallpox devoured tens of thousands of people across the globe, the epidemic helped Dr Edward Jenner in 1796 discover the vaccine to cure it. Thus, it became the first virus to be ended by the vaccine. Consequently, in 1980, WHO announced that Smallpox had been completely eradicated from the face of the Earth.
The Spanish Flu of 1918 which infected more than 500 million and killed more than 50 million people led to the discovery of camphor and use of masks. Cholera helped John Snow find its cause: The contaminated water. Snow’s efforts led to a global effort to improve urban sanitation.
While Novel Coronavirus has killed not less than 25,0000 people across the globe, by the time this article is being written, the quarantining that is enforced on people has resulted in various benefits to the environment. We have already seen the reduction in the deadly air pollution in China through the imagery shared by NASA. This reduction, as per the scientists from Stanford University, has likely saved the lives of 4,000 kids under five and 73,000 adults over 70 in China only.
Equally, the air-pollution-reduction has been recorded in Italy, too. You must have come across the pictures of dolphins and swans returning to Venetian waters on social media. This is because the waters are clearest they have been in generations. The sediments of canals haves settled because of no traffic over them on account of the quarantined population of the place.
But that doesn’t mean pandemics are good for health. What it means is that we create deadlier disasters than pandemics that go unnoticed. Bombings and killings across the globe, hunger and starvation of kids, climate change etc, et al, are all our own doings. Who knows what more is in store for us if we do not think before we act?
