Beech Tree News Network

Last week, I listened to an interview with Brian Melican on NPR.  Later I went to the suggested link to read the article that was referenced.  The name of the article is: “A tale of three cities: the places transformed by pandemics across history.  You can find it online at the New Statesman website.  The following information is taken from newstatesmen.com.

In 1720, Marseille, France, was the site of the world’s longest ever pandemic: the second plague (the Bubonic Plague).  Marseille was a port city that had largely avoided the plague for centuries (the first outbreak is believed to have happened in Asia around the mid-1300s).  The reason Marseille had been successful in avoiding the plague was because it had in place consuls across the Mediterranean who gathered information on rumored outbreaks across Europe.  Port inspectors would inspect captains’ logbooks before ships were allowed to enter the city’s main port.  If the ships were suspected of having had contact with people and places that had the plague, the ships were quarantined a safe distance away in secluded coves.  Even ships that passed inspection were allowed only as far as outcrops facing the harbor.  These ships had to wait 18 days.  Only after the all-clear could these vessels enter the main port of Marseille. 

If Marseille had stuck with this protocol, they would have remained plague-free.  But, as has happened many times in history, economics won out over prudence.  A ship carrying a large shipment of silk, destined for sell to the affluent, was allowed into the main port.  Entry was against the advice of the port authorities, who suspected some of the deaths that had occurred on the ship were due to the plague, but they were over-ruled by the merchants, who wanted to sell their products.  The cargo was quickly unloaded, and a few days later, the dock workers began to die.  The ship was burned, but it was too late.  Within weeks, the city was ravaged by a plague, which “raged for two years and left close to 50,000 dead—out of a population of about 80,000.”

The second pandemic Melican addresses is Cholera.  The city that took the greatest hit was Hamburg, Germany, in the summer of 1892, long after it had been eradicated elsewhere.  Hamburg’s city government was run by “part-time senators/full-time merchants.”  Economics was once again the factor in health dictates.  In 1884, Robert Koch had discovered Cholera bacteria lived in unsanitary water.  The merchant class of Hamburg, who were unwilling to clean up the drinking water of the town, scoffed at the idea.  They claimed instead that it was the “bad air” of the harbor causing the illness.  The merchant class didn’t want to deal with the squalid conditions in which the poor in their town lived.  Back in 1842, the Hamburg senate okayed a redesign of the city’s sewer system, but stopped short of installing a water filtration system, viewing it as an unnecessary expenditure.  The cholera epidemic killed 8,000 people in 10 weeks as a result.

The third pandemic Melican considers is the Spanish Flu of 1918.  The flu killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people globally.  The flu hit the town of Ostersund, Sweden particularly hard.  The reason for this Melican explains is because “the town had speedy railway connections, several army regiments in close quarters, and a malnourished population living in cramped accommodations.”  WWI was quickly escalating, and even though Sweden sought to remain neutral during the war, its troops were on high alert, and a large number of those troops were stationed at Ostersund.  The area was popular with tourists, because of the fresh air and scenery, which caused a great divide between the haves and the have-nots.  One man, an affluent banker, stepped into that great divide and turned things around.  He withdrew money from Stockholm without authorization and turned a school into a hospital—the town was without one.  He put together a medical team to help the poor and inspired people from all walks of life to come together to raise money for food, clothing and medical supplies.  After the epidemic, the services that were set up during the crisis remained.  Today, Ostersund is a model of efficiency and equality. 

As I write this article on pandemics, my brother, Carl, is in an ICU in a Louisville hospital.  He has the Corona virus, the pandemic of our era.  His fever is finally down from 103 to 99.8 degrees.  He has pneumonia in both lungs and is struggling to breathe.  Yesterday, he told his wife, Susan, on the phone that he was tired of fighting.  That scared me, because I have heard interviews with patients that say this virus makes you want to lay down and give up.  The medical team shifted him to his stomach today in order to keep the fluid from collecting in his lungs.  Carl is 58, he never smoked, and he has no underlying health conditions.  He is a simple sawmill man who works mostly outdoors. 

This virus is not a hoax.  It is not an invention of the media.  It is not a ploy by the federal government to control people and take their guns.  It is as real as the Bubonic Plague and Cholera and the Spanish flu.  It jumps the great divide, and if we don’t continue to stand together and fight it with, and for, one another, it will take us too.