How Will the Coronavirus Change Us? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Although medical data from the time are too scant to be definitive, its first attack is generally said to have occurred in Kansas in March 1918, as the U.S. was stepping up its involvement in the First World War.
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Estimates of the final death toll range from 17 million to 100 million, depending on assumptions about the number of uncounted victims. Almost 700,000 people are thought to have died in the United States—as a proportion of the population, equivalent to more than 2 million people today.
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Garthwaite matched NHIS respondents’ health conditions to the dates when their mothers were probably exposed to the flu. Mothers who got sick in the first months of pregnancy, he discovered, had babies who, 60 or 70 years later, were unusually likely to have diabetes; mothers afflicted at the end of pregnancy tended to bear children prone to kidney disease. The middle months were associated with heart disease.
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Other studies showed different consequences. Children born during the pandemic grew into shorter, poorer, less educated adults with higher rates of physical disability than one would expect
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the microorganisms likely killed more people than the war did. And their effects weren’t confined to European battlefields, but spread across the globe, emptying city streets and filling cemeteries on six continents.
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Unlike the war, the flu was incomprehensible—the influenza virus wasn’t even identified until 1931. It inspired fear of immigrants and foreigners, and anger toward the politicians who played down the virus
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killed more men than women, skewing sex ratios for years afterward. Can one be sure that the ensuing, abrupt changes in gender roles had nothing to do with the virus?
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the accompanying flood of anti-Semitic violence. As it spread through Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the Low Countries, it left behind a trail of beaten cadavers and burned homes.
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In northern Italy, landlords tended to raise wages, which fostered the development of a middle class. In southern Italy, the nobility enacted decrees to prevent peasants from leaving to take better offers. Some historians date the separation in fortunes of the two halves of Italy—the rich north, the poor south—to these decisions.
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When the Black Death began, the English Plantagenets were in the middle of a long, brutal campaign to conquer France. The population losses meant such a rise in the cost of infantrymen that the whole enterprise foundered. English nobles did not occupy French châteaus. Instead they stayed home and tried to force their farmhands to accept lower wages. The result, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, nearly toppled the English crown. King Richard II narrowly won out, but the monarchy’s ability to impose taxes, and thus its will, was permanently weakened.
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The coronavirus is hitting societies that regarded deadly epidemics as things of the past, like whalebone corsets and bowler hats.
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The American public has not enjoyed its surprise reentry into the world of contagion and quarantine—and this unhappiness seems likely to have consequences.
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People sought new sources of authority, finding them through direct personal experience with the world and with God.
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With the supply of European workers suddenly reduced and the demand for labor relatively unchanged, medieval landowners found themselves in a pickle: They could leave their grain to rot in the fields, or they could abandon all sense of right and wrong and raise wages enough to attract scarce workers
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Within a few decades, Cohn wrote, hysteria gave way to sober observation. Medical tracts stopped referring to conjunctions of Saturn and prescribed more earthly cures: ointments, herbs, methods for lancing boils. Even priestly writings focused on the empirical. “God was not mentioned,” Cohn noted. The massacres of Jews mostly stopped.
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the lesson seems more that humans confronting unexpected disaster engage in a contest for explanation—and the outcome can have consequences that ripple for decades or centuries.
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Somewhere between two-thirds and nine-tenths of the people in the Americas died. Many later European settlers, like my umpteen-great-grandparents, believed they were coming to a vacant wilderness. But the land was not empty; it had been emptied—a world of loss encompassed in a shift of tense.
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Absent the diseases, it is difficult to imagine how small groups of poorly equipped Europeans at the end of very long supply chains could have survived and even thrived in the alien ecosystems of the Americas
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“I fully support banning travel from Europe to prevent the spread of infectious disease,” the Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle remarked after President Trump announced his plan to do this. “I just think it’s 528 years too late.”
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a possible legacy of Hong Kong’s success with SARS is that its citizens seem to put more faith in collective action than they used to
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The result will be, among other things, a test of how much contemporary U.S. society values the elderly.
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The speed with which pundits emerged to propose that the U.S. could more easily tolerate a raft of dead oldsters than an economic contraction indicates that the reservoir of appreciation for today’s elders is not as deep as it once was
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the 2003 SARS epidemic in Hong Kong. That epidemic, which killed about 300 people, was stopped only by heroic communal efforts. (As a percentage of the population, the equivalent U.S. death toll would be about 15,000.)
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For Native peoples, the U-shaped curve was as devastating as the sheer loss of life. As an indigenous archaeologist once put it to me, the epidemics simultaneously robbed his nation of its future and its past: the former, by killing all the children; the latter, by killing all the elders, who were its storehouses of wisdom and experience.
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Past societies mourned the loss of collective memory caused by epidemics. Ours may not, at least at first.