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    History need not repeat itself when we write the journal of our plague year | Jessica Otis

    Accounts of earlier pandemics eerily echo our coronavirus crisis but teach us that small decisions can affect the outcome
    by Jessica Otis Jul 19, 2020 3 minutes
    In 1666 London rushed to get back to normal after the devastating plague despite ‘there dying some people still’. Photograph: PHAS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    The year is 1665 and the plague is in London. A man riding through Essex finds “all the way people, citizens, walking to and again to enquire how the plague is in the city this week”. He dutifully tells one person after another there have been 2,020 new plague deaths.

    Flash forward to 2020 and Covid-19 is everywhere. People are once again clamoring for numbers – confirmed cases, hospitalizations, deaths and positivity rates – and for exactly the same reason.

    Like the people of early modern London, we see the numbers as a way of the numbers. When the numbers rise, we consider . When the numbers fall, we think hopefully about . And when the numbers rise again, we wonder like this?

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