We were remiss in learning lessons from the past

Idly looking at some of the books on my shelf the other day, I pulled out “A Journal of The Plague Year,” published by Daniel Defoe in 1722. That was nearly 60 years after the great bubonic plague swept across much of Europe and the United Kingdom, beginning in about 1663.

No one needs to disturb his peace of mind, I thought, with a book like this at this particular time. But before I closed the book, I couldn’t help but spot-read some of the events recorded. Here is one of the plague-related regulations posted in London at the time:

“That care be taken of hackney-coachmen that they may not (as some of them have been observed to do after carrying of infected persons to the pest-house and other places) be admitted to common use till their coaches be well-aired and have stood unemployed by the space of five or six days after such service.”

Defoe was not in London at the time but he communicated with people who were.

While he tied together his notes with his excellent imagination, his account is more history than fiction. A painted red X on the door of a house warned people to stay away as the occupants were infected; farmers and fishers bringing foods into the city to sell were encouraged to stay on the outskirts and customers would go to them; congregations of people were discouraged; a cough or sneeze was a much-feared danger sign.

Thames boatmen ran food errands to supply crews and whole families trapped aboard moored vessels;

Generally, business suffered; work was left undone. Transportation of essential goods was haphazard at best. Rumour, conflicting information — it all ran unchecked.

While we have every reason today to be thankful for the seemingly miraculous advance of science, some other areas where we might expect similar achievement leave large questions.

Considering the unbridled global leap of COVID-19 today, the average person must be tempted to ask: where were the “distant early warnings?” Where were the wise, pre-emptive steps before planes discharged their human cargo from all corners of the globe like the caravels of old depositing seamen and inflected fleas onto the London docks?

Instead of alchemists and quack chemists and doomsday prophets braying to God we have such things as Centres for Disease Control; we know the value of mass testing and ventilators.

We also know the importance of unified, enlightened approaches to inhibiting the spread of disease.

We can communicate around the world in a click. Have we not employed qualified watchdogs? And why did we ignore those serious-minded people who warned of the likelihood of pandemic?

Today we can search the distant reaches of space but we cannot protect ourselves from a squirming “petri dish” of plague in some raw and open market bent on sending its replicates into the world, seeking and finding accommodating hosts.

Paul Sparkes

St. John’s