Diane Zahler

This is a very weird time.

We wake up every morning with a sense of impending doom. How close will Covid-19 come to us today? What vacations or conferences will be cancelled, what sports teams will stop playing, what schools will close, what businesses will be forced to shut down? How far will the stock market plunge? Will our Purell run out?

I hesitate to say that all things are relative, because it feels like rules have been suspended. Maybe all things are not relative. Maybe this will be worse than we can imagine. But I’ve written a book on bubonic plague (and just finished a novel set in the time of the Black Death), and thinking about that disaster does seem to put this one in a different perspective. Here are some reasons why we are slightly better off than the potential plague victims of the fourteenth century — and one reason we aren’t:

• We know what causes Covid-19. This will enable us to create a vaccine for it eventually and allows us to take measures to contain it in the meantime. In the 1300s, people thought the plague was a punishment for their sins, or the effect of bad air, or the work of witches, or the result of a bad astrological conjunction. Their reactions ranged from wearing garlic and other herbs around their necks (okay, some people are doing that now) to closing themselves indoors to avoid the air (yes, we are doing that too) to attacking and/or burning those they felt were responsible (right, more on that later.) There was also some self-flagellation, which I haven’t seen yet on CNN.

• We know how Covid-19 is transmitted. In the 1300s, people had no idea that the fleas that bit them were imparting a death sentence. (Fifty to seventy percent of victims died.) And when the plague morphed to pneumonic and septicemic versions (with a death rate of nearly 100 percent), they didn’t understand that touching, breathing on, and bleeding on others would transmit the disease.

• We are generally healthier. One reason plague victims died in such huge numbers is that a famine years earlier had weakened them. Plus it was the Middle Ages, when life expectancy at birth was around 35 years.

• Many of us have toilet paper, food, and hand sanitizer to hoard. In the 1300s, there was little to squirrel away even if people had thought to do so. People who didn’t contract the plague often died of starvation. And though medieval folk washed and bathed far more than most people imagine, “Cleanliness is next to godliness” wasn’t a thing until John Wesley said it in 1778.

One similarity, however, between the plague years and now is the obscenely bigoted reaction coronavirus has generated. Terror breeds intolerance in every age, it seems. Just as medieval people blamed the Jews for the plague, some today are blaming the Chinese. In 1350, oddly enough, Pope Clement VI issued a papal bull proclaiming that Jewish people were NOT at fault for the disease, stating, “It cannot be true that the Jews, by such a heinous crime, are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world the same plague, by the hidden judgment of God, has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them.” A sensible man, it appears — sensible enough to remit the sins of all who died of the plague. (He did, however, believe in sending Crusaders to fight the Ottoman Turks.)

If there’s a takeaway from this post, I’d hope it would be this: Covid-19 is not, and will not become, the Black Death, which killed between 30 and 60 percent of the population of Europe at the time (possibly as many as 25 million people). And we are not, and I hope will not become, the victims of our own fear, turning against each other as we search for something or someone to blame. In a world that seems utterly out of control, the one thing we CAN control is our own behavior.

 

 

Also: WASH YOUR HANDS.