Lessons from the Black Death regarding coronavirus

The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague” by Dorsey Armstrong, a professor at Purdue, talks about places that were spared from most of the waves of plague that swept through Europe starting in 1348.

If we don’t want to die from coronavirus, what can we do?

Iceland was an example of a place that escaped plague for more than 50 years. It took a long time to reach Iceland by ship so asymptomatic carriers of the plague couldn’t walk off into port in Iceland. More likely they, and all of their crewmates, would die before reaching Iceland.

People today travel by plane, however, which is nearly instantaneous. So the “far away by ship” advantage does not seem likely to be realized by any country today.

Finland remained substantially plague-free, says the author, despite having land borders with Sweden, Norway, and Russia, as well as being integrated into the sea trading network of the time that had spread the disease so quickly throughout the Mediterranean and to the British Isles. The secret in Finland was low population density.

Wikipedia says, regarding the influenza pandemic of 1918: “In the U.S., about 28% of the population of 105 million became infected, and 500,000 to 675,000 died (0.48 to 0.64 percent of the population).” Our population is more than 3X the 1918 level and therefore our population density is more than 3X the 1918 level. So the Finland trick cannot work for Americans in general. But maybe for an individual American it could. Move to a non-urban area of a spread-out state, e.g., Alaska or Wyoming. Follow Barbra Streisand and the rest of the Hollywood #Resist crowd to Canada (or pick a different low-density country, such as Argentina).

The professor says that governments that shut down or severely restricted links to the outside world ended up saving most of their citizens and/or subjects. So maybe North Korea or a similarly restricted nation will be comparatively safe?

The professor says that cities with good sanitation did not escape the plague, but death rates were lower. So Japan and Switzerland might have fewer cases of coronavirus? “Mortality burden of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in Europe” says that Switzerland was not significantly different from France (but sparsely populated Finland suffered only half the death rate).

Integrating what we know from the Black Death and present-day statistics and conditions, Iceland and New Zealand seem like the most obvious places to run for a re-enactment of the Decameron. They’re islands. They have lower population densities than the U.S. They have comfortably high living standards. However, we need to cross Iceland off the list due to the fact that it operates an international airline hub. People from more than 50 different countries might show up on a typical evening. That leaves… New Zealand.

Fun fact: We get the word “quarantine” from the Venetian government’s requirement that ships coming into Dubrovnik wait at a nearby island for 40 days before coming into contact with the townspeople.

At least we’ll never have to worry about plague per se, again, right? Actually… the bacterium has evolved antibiotic resistance in Madagascar (CDC) and the fleas that carry it have evolved insecticide resistance.