lilies
The Living Force
China: >2021 Autumn - winter - Christmas - May 2022<
777 million fully vaccinated in China, authorities say as country records lowest rate of Covid-19 infections since July
1. China = ash mound. [Got visual image of knee to waist deep in cremation chamber & burial sites]
2. I could taste the granulated ash on the back of my throat.
- "Take care to not celebrate such record vaxxing achievements, lest You turn your country into an ash-heap!"
3. By probably May 2022 (some still this year) China - it looks - will be cremating a good portion of this record 777mil jabbed unfortunates and the heaps of ash making knee deep mounds there. This would signal: no manpower left to bury and sanitary decision of authorities to cremate to solve the problem as high-tech furnaces are available.
Versus the Middle-Ages: forced-different handling of the dead in old times:
Some country leaders already mentioned "We are hoping it won't come to.." burning down the houses of infected.
Regards the history of The Black Plague, this of course goes completely against the customs / of the times, because:
Cremation numbers reveal possible suppression of true COVID-19 data in China
777 million fully vaccinated in China, authorities say as country records lowest rate of Covid-19 infections since July
When I read the title of this article, I got the following image:
1. China = ash mound. [Got visual image of knee to waist deep in cremation chamber & burial sites]
2. I could taste the granulated ash on the back of my throat.
- "Take care to not celebrate such record vaxxing achievements, lest You turn your country into an ash-heap!"
3. By probably May 2022 (some still this year) China - it looks - will be cremating a good portion of this record 777mil jabbed unfortunates and the heaps of ash making knee deep mounds there. This would signal: no manpower left to bury and sanitary decision of authorities to cremate to solve the problem as high-tech furnaces are available.
Versus the Middle-Ages: forced-different handling of the dead in old times:
Paula R. Stiles
, SFWA member, PhD Medieval History, BA Classics, Ed. Innsmouth Free Press, RPCV.
Answered 3 years ago · Author has 518 answers and 1.5M answer views
What could have been done differently to stop the spread of the Black Plague during the Middle Ages, with the tools they had available at the time?
The really disturbing probable answer is “Almost nothing.” Yes, there are ways you could personally avoid getting the plague in the middle of an outbreak if you knew what the vectors were. You could avoid fleas, sick animals and being coughed on by sick people. If you managed that, you’d be golden.
But there was no way, with the technology and infrastructure of the time, to stop the spread of the contagion to populations in general. This is because humans were not (and never have been) the primary vector for the fleas that carry the bacillus. Rodents are.
That’s a big reason why any assertion that the influenza pandemic of 1918 was the worst pandemic of all time is ludicrous—it spreads by human contact. That’s its vector. Isolate yourself from other humans before you pick up the virus and you will never get it. That pandemic spread all over the world, true (thanks, largely, to troop movements near the end of WWI), but it only killed, at worst, 10% of the world population.
In contrast, the Black Death of the 14th century (not actually either the first or last of the plague pandemics) killed anywhere from 16 to 50% (or more) of the world population, with medieval historians currently favoring the higher end of that range. And that’s not even taking into account the possibility that the huge mortality rates in the New World, which occurred while the pandemic was still going on in Eurasia and Africa, were driven by plague. People couldn’t escape plague. It followed them even where there were no other people.
The reason why the Black Death has been so deadly and persistent in history is because of the rodent problem. Once plague is in a rodent population, it’s effectively impossible to eradicate. The spread among human populations was secondary to the huge and rapid spread through rodent (and flea) populations in Eurasia in the 14th century. It’s why it continues to pop up in areas where it had previously died out. It’s why we have plague in the western U.S. (thanks to the Third Pandemic, which only officially ended in 1959).
There is no way you can control the rodent populations of entire continents, let alone all those fleas. Even now, we struggle to control fleas, especially in the southern U.S., where they have become resistant to topical treatments for pets. The best you can do is limit human population exposure to those vectors and try to control the spread to other rodent populations. In the 14th century, keeping rodents and fleas out of all contact with humans was an unattainable goal (and believe me, they tried; our ancestors hated rats and fleas).
So, there really wasn’t anything humans could have done to stop it or make it any better in the 14th century, except on a very personal and short-term basis. The best you could say is that draining wetlands (as in the Netherlands) and displacing the rodents in those areas was a bad idea. But flooding in Central Asia may have pushed infected rodents into contact with humans, anyway. One could also argue that the Mongols spread plague with their empire-making, but people had been flooding out of Central Asia for thousands of years without causing pandemics, so it seems unlikely stopping the Mongols would have stopped the plague.
It’s easy for us humans to get arrogant these days about what we can and can’t do, to the point of claiming we’re changing our global environment more than we probably are, both for better and worse. We really need to remember that the world has many natural processes that are well beyond our control and this was even more true in 1347.
, SFWA member, PhD Medieval History, BA Classics, Ed. Innsmouth Free Press, RPCV.
Answered 3 years ago · Author has 518 answers and 1.5M answer views
What could have been done differently to stop the spread of the Black Plague during the Middle Ages, with the tools they had available at the time?
The really disturbing probable answer is “Almost nothing.” Yes, there are ways you could personally avoid getting the plague in the middle of an outbreak if you knew what the vectors were. You could avoid fleas, sick animals and being coughed on by sick people. If you managed that, you’d be golden.
But there was no way, with the technology and infrastructure of the time, to stop the spread of the contagion to populations in general. This is because humans were not (and never have been) the primary vector for the fleas that carry the bacillus. Rodents are.
That’s a big reason why any assertion that the influenza pandemic of 1918 was the worst pandemic of all time is ludicrous—it spreads by human contact. That’s its vector. Isolate yourself from other humans before you pick up the virus and you will never get it. That pandemic spread all over the world, true (thanks, largely, to troop movements near the end of WWI), but it only killed, at worst, 10% of the world population.
In contrast, the Black Death of the 14th century (not actually either the first or last of the plague pandemics) killed anywhere from 16 to 50% (or more) of the world population, with medieval historians currently favoring the higher end of that range. And that’s not even taking into account the possibility that the huge mortality rates in the New World, which occurred while the pandemic was still going on in Eurasia and Africa, were driven by plague. People couldn’t escape plague. It followed them even where there were no other people.
The reason why the Black Death has been so deadly and persistent in history is because of the rodent problem. Once plague is in a rodent population, it’s effectively impossible to eradicate. The spread among human populations was secondary to the huge and rapid spread through rodent (and flea) populations in Eurasia in the 14th century. It’s why it continues to pop up in areas where it had previously died out. It’s why we have plague in the western U.S. (thanks to the Third Pandemic, which only officially ended in 1959).
There is no way you can control the rodent populations of entire continents, let alone all those fleas. Even now, we struggle to control fleas, especially in the southern U.S., where they have become resistant to topical treatments for pets. The best you can do is limit human population exposure to those vectors and try to control the spread to other rodent populations. In the 14th century, keeping rodents and fleas out of all contact with humans was an unattainable goal (and believe me, they tried; our ancestors hated rats and fleas).
So, there really wasn’t anything humans could have done to stop it or make it any better in the 14th century, except on a very personal and short-term basis. The best you could say is that draining wetlands (as in the Netherlands) and displacing the rodents in those areas was a bad idea. But flooding in Central Asia may have pushed infected rodents into contact with humans, anyway. One could also argue that the Mongols spread plague with their empire-making, but people had been flooding out of Central Asia for thousands of years without causing pandemics, so it seems unlikely stopping the Mongols would have stopped the plague.
It’s easy for us humans to get arrogant these days about what we can and can’t do, to the point of claiming we’re changing our global environment more than we probably are, both for better and worse. We really need to remember that the world has many natural processes that are well beyond our control and this was even more true in 1347.
Some country leaders already mentioned "We are hoping it won't come to.." burning down the houses of infected.
Regards the history of The Black Plague, this of course goes completely against the customs / of the times, because:
Cremation numbers reveal possible suppression of true COVID-19 data in China
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