Travelling in the Sudan with Concern Worldwide, we stopped at a village plantation. The trees had been planted, watered and tended and were thriving.
As we stood chatting, there was a commotion; workers began running round waving their arms but to no avail – a swarm of locusts descended and began decimating the precious young shoots and the saplings were left denuded.
It was devastating and I thought of the plagues foretold in the Bible. The Book of Chronicles talks of God holding back the rain and sending locusts to eat up the crops or sending an epidemic when communities forget Godly ways. Sadly, so often it’s the innocent who are caught up in such punishments – witness what is happening in the world today.
Apparently there are around 100 mentions of plagues in the Bible, with boils, frogs and pestilence among them. Many people are pointing towards the Covid-19 as a modern plague but can it be compared to the dreadful year of 1347 and the first appearance of the Black Death, also known as The Plague?
Dr Geoffrey Todd, a local consultant chest physician, has made a study of this aspect of disease.
“The Black Death erupted in western Europe for the first time, to be followed by intermittent deadly outbreaks over the next 300 years. Death visited major European cities as never before and the populations of cities such as Florence and London were reduced by more than 50 per cent," according to Dr Todd.
The Plague
“Although they did not know it then, The Plague was caused by a bacterium known as “Yersinia Pestis”, normally an infection of rodents but which jumped species to humans via carrier fleas or lice. It was highly infectious, lethal and spread rapidly.
"Death, often agonising, could occur within 24 hours – 'They died by heaps and were buried by heaps’. Over 300 plague pits, containing thousands of corpses, were dug in London alone.”
In this part of Ireland in the 1800s, we had epidemics of cholera, dysentery and smallpox, killing thousands. Many bodies were burned to prevent the spread of infection, others buried in a large deep hole in Frier’s Bush Cemetery in Belfast's Stranmillis area.
Here the ‘plaguey pit’ lies to this day, undisturbed for fear that interfering with it would release contamination and so the road narrows at the Ulster Museum to accommodate the bones in the pit.
Although no-one had any idea what caused The Black Death they soon realised it could be passed on from one person to the next and quarantine was widely practised; quarantine derives from the Italian for 40, the number of days ships due to dock at Venice had to remain anchored off the coast to prove that they were plague free.
“Like the plague, Covid-19 jumped species from non-human to human. It’s highly infectious, therefore quarantine or social isolating is very important as humans have no inbuilt immunity so death can happen,” Dr Todd says.
But there the resemblance ends
“There were various types of plague – bubonic, affecting the glands; pneumonic, affecting the lungs, with mortality rates accounting for 500 to 900 in every 1,000 sufferers. However, Covid-19 average mortality is probably around 0.1 to 0.3 per cent, meaning that out of every 1,000 people who catch the disease 10-30 will die.
“The other major difference is that The Plague affected all ages. In contrast, according to the government statistician Professor Sir David Speiglehalter, Covid-19 is a disease of the over-75s, with the young having an extremely low risk of death.
“Thus Covid-19 does not really bear comparison with The Plague and actually, in the league table of lethal infections that have afflicted humanity from time to time, it ranks very low. ‘Premier league’ pandemics include smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria. Even today, worldwide, 1.5 million people die every year from tuberculosis, the most lethal of infectious diseases.”
According to Dr Todd we are not faced with some new horrific decimating plague. Our reaction to this latest pandemic is not shaped by its mortality rate but instead by our changed attitude today to life and death.
“In medieval times life was short, nasty and brutal and expectations were low but today the medical mantra often appears to be 'no-one must ever die'. In the elderly, every abnormality is often exhaustively investigated and age is no bar to major surgery.
"The measures that are being taken to prevent the spread of the pandemic – ie ‘the lockdown’ – are drastic and there may be a big price to pay. If it continues or is renewed we could be facing economic meltdown, mass unemployment, levels of poverty and hunger not seen for centuries and possibly even societal collapse.
"Although the young are very much less likely to contract this disease, they will ultimately pay the biggest price in terms of debt, unemployment, poverty and mental disease, all of which can cause large increases in deaths.”
Geoffrey Todd reports that it’s estimated that the 2008/9 financial crisis resulted in a million people of working age contracting chronic health problems, both physical and mental.
“Deaths from unemployment and poverty are often viewed as just a statistic. ‘Unemployment’ or ‘Poverty’ will never appear on any death certificate, nor are photographs of such victims likely to appear in newspapers or on the six o’clock news – but surely they are none the less equally important.”
This makes for disturbing reading
“Although every death from Covid-19 is indeed tragic,” he concludes, “this pandemic is not exceptional in comparison to the great pandemics of the past, except perhaps in one respect – if we do not get the right balance of preventative strategy versus economic consequences there’s a possibility that it may be the first pandemic where the measures that are taken have a worse outcome than the disease."
