Lessons from past pandemics

At the time of writing, the coronavirus COVID-19 continues to dominate headlines worldwide. Why are we so afraid of pandemics?

I think it’s something very primitive in us. We’ve had to deal with epidemics of infectious disease – plagues, to use a more ancient and Biblical kind of term – since we settled down in semipermanent settlements and started farming, about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. Infections that adapted to big groups of densely living people, known as crowd diseases, evolved in parallel with us as we adopted those new, more sedentary lifestyles.

So a kind of arms race between these microorganisms and humans has been ongoing for a very long time. They know us very well and unfortunately, because they’re small and they reproduce much faster, they tend to be a step ahead. They can just mutate and adapt, and they’re wherever we don’t want them to be before we can do anything about it. We’re seeing that again now. There are many aspects of a pandemic that don’t change over time, and those are the ones that speak to our most ancient fears.