What can we learn about 2020 from the Black Death? Dorsey Armstrong has all the answers

The US professor became an unlikely TV star this year, with a series about the plague. She explains what the 1348 pandemic can tell us today about conspiracy theories, recklessness, deurbanisation and social unrest A pandemic rages across the globe, leaving a trail of death, confusion and economic ruin, and changing everything. This is a new disease, about which little is understood. People and communities don’t know what to do, and they react in different ways – sensibly, understandably, honourably, idiotically, criminally. Cities go into lockdown, quarantine rules are introduced, new hospitals are built to try to cope with the numbers of sick. There are heroes and acts of kindness and selflessness. There are also deniers, conspiracy theorists, finger pointers. And there are people – including those in positions of leadership and power – who don’t just fail to step up to the plate, but abandon the field of play. The year is 1348, of course. Not 2020, but you knew that. Different deals: Covid is a virus; the Black Death – the Great Mortality, pestilence, plague – a flea-driven bacterial infection. Now (it still exists) plague is mostly treatable with antibiotics; then, of course, it lived up to its names. “The thing I like to stress to people feeling anxious about Covid is that the mortality rate for the Black Death in the 14th century was about 80%,” says Dorsey Armstrong. With Covid it is far, far lower, “although I understand absolutely it’s not encouraging to people with family members who have gotten ill and who have died”. Continue reading...
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