17th century plague more deadly than Black Death
The plague spread across London around four times faster in the 17 th century than it had in the 14th century, a new study suggests.
Researchers found an acceleration in transmission between the Black Death of 1348 – estimated to have wiped out more than one-third of the population of Europe – and later epidemics, which culminated in the Great Plague of 1665.
They analysed thousands of documents covering a 300 -year span of plague outbreaks in the city, and found that, in the 14 th century, the number of people infected during an outbreak doubled approximately every 43 days.
By the 17 th century, the number was doubling every 11 days, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
David Earn, a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at Mcmaster University, Canada, and investigator with the Michael G Degroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, led the study.
He said: "It is an astounding difference in how fast plague epidemics grew."
The researchers, including statisticians, biologists and evolutionary geneticists estimated death rates by analysing historical, demographic and epidemiological data from three sources – personal wills and testaments, parish registers, and the London Bills of Mortality.
Prof Earn said: "At that time, people typically wrote wills because they were dying or they feared they might die imminently, so we hypothesised that the dates of wills would be a good proxy for the spread of fear, and of death itself.”