Historian, philosopher and best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari wrote recently, “Humankind is now facing a global crisis. Perhaps the biggest crisis of our generation. The decisions people and governments take in the next few weeks will probably shape the world for years to come.”
He went on to say, “When choosing between alternatives, we should ask ourselves not only how to overcome the immediate threat, but also what kind of world we will inhabit once the storm passes. Yes, the storm will pass, humankind will survive but we will inhabit a different world.”
So, what will this different world be like? Lasting change will result in big changes to the frequency and way we travel, buying homes, security measures and our approach to loss of freedom due to increased surveillance.
It will not all be bad news as we adapt to become more sophisticated when it comes to the use of technology and we will have an increased appreciation of the outdoors and many of the simpler pleasures in life.
This pandemic has seen us losing our innocence due to our ignorance and lack of understanding of how vulnerable we are as human beings. We have become used to hearing good news such as how air travel becomes safer every year and less people are being killed in traffic accidents.
Pandemics are not new and back in 541 – 542AD the world had to deal with the Justinianic Plague with port cities around the entire Mediterranean affected as ships harbouring rats that carried fleas infected millions resulting in the deaths of up to an estimated 100 million people.
In 1347 we had to deal with the Black Death, the most devastating pandemic recorded in human history, resulting in the deaths of up to an estimated 200m people. Originating in Central Asia or East Asia it travelled along the Silk Road carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on merchant ships.
The third plague pandemic began in China in 1855 and the name refers to this pandemic being the third major bubonic plague outbreak to affect European society. This plague spread to all inhabited continents and led to millions of deaths. From colonial Hong Kong the plague spread far and wide, reaching places such as Glasgow in Scotland, Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and San Francisco in the US. According to the World Health Organisation, the pandemic was considered active until 1960, when worldwide casualties dropped to 200 per year.
Fast forward to this century and in 2003 we had to deal with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). In late 2017, Chinese scientists traced the virus through the intermediary of civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Yunnan province.
Nine years later in 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) hit the headlines. MERS-CoV is a betacoronavirus derived from bats and mortality is about one-third of diagnosed cases.
Today we are dealing with the coronavirus or Covid-19 which was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, and since then it spread globally. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause illnesses ranging widely in severity and SARS, MERS and Covid-19 are from the same virus family.
From rats to bats it seems the message was out there and we chose to look the other way.
Gordon is the former president and chief executive of BMMI. He can be reached at gordonboyle@hotmail.com