Anatomy Of A Pandemic

History has much to teach us about how to survive the COVID-19 outbreak. We need to listen to the lessons of the past

- Kevin Patterson

To be alive is to be afraid; anxiety is the spirit of this age and, substantially, of all ages. However good things have gotten, at least for those of us in Canada — however low crime and unemployment rates have become, however much war deaths have declined, life expectancy has grown, or Hiv, cancer, and age-adjusted heart disease death rates have shrunk — disquiet claws at us. Financiers may advise that what they call the downside risk — the potential for loss in the worst cases — is limited, but at an existential level, we know better. Everything could just go all to hell, no matter how shiny things look. You don’t need to be a wigged-out prepper in the woods to suspect it.

Things have always gone all to hell. Over 4,000 years ago, climate change came to Mesopotamia, causing drought and a subsequent famine so severe that the world’s first empire, Akkad, simply ceased to be. Farmers abandoned their crops and many scribes just stopped writing. For archaeologists, for the next 300 years: near silence.

This is from The Curse of Akkad, written around the time of the silencing:

Those who lay down on the roof, died on the roof; those who lay down in the house were not buried. People were flailing at themselves from hunger. By the Ki-ur, Enlil’s great place, dogs were packed together in the silent streets; if two men walked there they would be devoured by them, and if three men walked there they would be devoured by them.

In the third century, the Three Kingdoms war-shattered China. The An Lushan Rebellion, five centuries later, shattered it again. Millions died in each of: the Mongol conquests, the nineteenth century’s Taiping Rebellion, colonialism in the Americas, the Thirty Years’ War in Europe — and, of course, the World Wars, which killed, conservatively, over 110 million.