Part of the problem is a false sense of security, the idea that pandemic plans and early-warning systems have taken us out of the danger zone. It’s as if someone has just flicked a switch in a darkened room of viruses and allowed us to see the invisible enemies we’ve been living with all along. But we didn’t, then, have the technology to trace a new virus on its journey around the world, conduct PCR tests, sequence genomes or trace each new variant. The death toll of spring 2020 in Britain, while sickening, was lower than the winters of 1969-70, 1975-90. But it was written up as a nasty flu season.Īs science advances and vaccines are found, we’ve shown that we’re prepared to go to far greater lengths, inflicting far greater cost, to prevent infections.
For all our talk about Spanish flu, Ferguson says the better comparison is the Asian flu of 1957-58, which was as dangerous as COVID in 2020. If a few hundred young people die of a heatwave, as happened in 2003, it’s an emergency. We have long talked about ‘excess winter deaths’ with about 20,000 victims - but because they tend to be elderly, they attract far less concern. One Royal Commission calculated that of 70,000 British soldiers in India, 4,830 would die each year, requiring 5,800 hospital beds for those incapacitated by illness.ĬOVID perhaps marks the end of Britain being sanguine about killer viruses. The Victorians saw disease as a price paid for venturing out into the world. One of the blessings the Pilgrims gave thanks for at Plymouth in 1621 was that disease had killed off 90 percent of the indigenous peoples, leaving the land free to settle. We carried Europe’s lurgies over the Atlantic when we discovered America, and they killed more natives than our armies ever did. Viruses helped as well as hindered the story of the West.
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