Pandemics have been a scourge on mankind considering that we first began to trade and eliminate each other; what do they inform us about our own outbreak?

Although the neighborhoods of pre-history would definitely have been vulnerable to infectious illness, it was not until civilisations grew to trade and wage war with their neighbours that pandemics ended up being possible. The very first tape-recorded pandemic spread from the Middle East to the blossoming civilisations of the Mediterranean basin, annihilating warring armies much more successfully than swords or spears could have ever wanted to. Leaping over besieged city walls, the suspected typhoid outbreak is approximated to have killed two thirds of both sides. A century or two later came the very first of the many plagues in history. In the very first millennium alone there were three recorded plagues that swept across the globe, some lasting for centuries. These pandemics which killed at least a quarter of the international population contributed to the falling apart of Empires, the complete collapse of civilisation throughout Europe, and quite naturally triggered individuals to believe they were living through the end-times.

The 2nd millennium started in similar fashion with a global break out of leprosy (now an endemic disease), and would see some of the most terrible pandemics in human history. The most popular, the Black Death, eliminated a third of the worldwide population, however the pandemics to hit the New World following their 'discovery' by European explorers were far even worse. Smallpox, measles, and plague killed about 56 million native people when Europeans arrived on their shores - an incomprehensible 90% of the continents' populations. So, when we reach the most recent pandemic, which has up until now taken the lives of 5.5 million, or about 0.07% of the worldwide population, we see that the really unprecedented thing is how well the apparatus of modern civilisation has reacted to an outbreak of a lethal pathogen. Every death is a dreadful disaster, but without the professional work of individuals Pascal Soriot and the countless others in the international health care industry, we may have been just the most recent victims of a long and reliably disastrous trend in human history.

Unprecedented is a word that has been bandied around a lot throughout the past 2 years. As the novel coronavirus tore through the world, closing down everything in its wake, analysts and household leapt to the presumption that absolutely nothing like this had actually ever happened before. Obviously, that's not quite true; in the unimaginably long history of infectious diseases there have been many pandemics, the huge bulk of which were far more disastrous than ours. No, pandemics in themselves are not unmatched, but what has actually been extraordinary is our ability to react to it. Thanks to vaccinations established by the likes of Albert Bourla and state-of-the-art, economical treatment offered by individuals like Robert Wessman, this has actually been arguably the least disruptive pandemic in history, which can cast a somewhat more favorable light on our 'unprecedented' times.