Unprecedented
Saturday 28th March – 5.30pm
That's the word they are using everywhere to describe it – unprecedented.
It's not, of course. There have been plagues aplenty, viral infections and pandemics galore. We have definitely been here before. Precedent? You need only a vague knowledge of history to encounter it. From black deaths and bubonic plagues to Spanish 'flu the history of mankind is stuffed full of pandemics and waves of apocalyptic viral destruction.
However, such is the success of modern medicine that in my lifetime there are only a few occasions when I really became aware of scary stuff like coronavirus. I remember the posters on public transport pleading with people to not spit as it spread TB (tuberculosis). Time was, you see, when people did spit on the pavement. Certainly my father's generation (he was born in 1925) used to, and other cultures do as a matter of course. The Koreans do, and it is not uncommon to hear and see them gob on the pavements of New Malden casually as an unconscious act. Asian cultures do it regularly and see it as an entirely normal thing. If you don't believe me ask Ross Coomber
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-22184499
The only other scare I remember (apart from the background and often routine inoculations of polio, smallpox and diphtheria. Am I imagining that I was inoculated against smallpox in the early 1960s?) was the typhoid outbreak of 1964. I remember news of its spread being on the radio (an electric device which relayed BBC audio-only output!) and I noticed my mother's fear of it. Typhoid seemed to be conveyed in tinned produce and for a while there was a frenzy of concern over buying it. Finally the source was traced to tins of corned beef from South America marketed by Fray Bentos. A grocery in Aberdeen was inadvertetly spreading it via its meat-slicing machine. It was all over quickly, but there were 400 identified cases, quarantine orders and three deaths.
Unprecedented then in modern times.
That's the word they are using everywhere to describe it – unprecedented.
It's not, of course. There have been plagues aplenty, viral infections and pandemics galore. We have definitely been here before. Precedent? You need only a vague knowledge of history to encounter it. From black deaths and bubonic plagues to Spanish 'flu the history of mankind is stuffed full of pandemics and waves of apocalyptic viral destruction.
However, such is the success of modern medicine that in my lifetime there are only a few occasions when I really became aware of scary stuff like coronavirus. I remember the posters on public transport pleading with people to not spit as it spread TB (tuberculosis). Time was, you see, when people did spit on the pavement. Certainly my father's generation (he was born in 1925) used to, and other cultures do as a matter of course. The Koreans do, and it is not uncommon to hear and see them gob on the pavements of New Malden casually as an unconscious act. Asian cultures do it regularly and see it as an entirely normal thing. If you don't believe me ask Ross Coomber
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-22184499
The only other scare I remember (apart from the background and often routine inoculations of polio, smallpox and diphtheria. Am I imagining that I was inoculated against smallpox in the early 1960s?) was the typhoid outbreak of 1964. I remember news of its spread being on the radio (an electric device which relayed BBC audio-only output!) and I noticed my mother's fear of it. Typhoid seemed to be conveyed in tinned produce and for a while there was a frenzy of concern over buying it. Finally the source was traced to tins of corned beef from South America marketed by Fray Bentos. A grocery in Aberdeen was inadvertetly spreading it via its meat-slicing machine. It was all over quickly, but there were 400 identified cases, quarantine orders and three deaths.
Unprecedented then in modern times.
Comments
Post a Comment