Hacker News Reader

One particularly crucial difference, I think, is public knowledge about diseases in general. During the plague, people were blaming every minority they could find. Can't really stop the spread of a disease if the extent of your knowledge of epidemiology is "God is punishing us because of you!". No "stay at home", no "wash your hands", no "don't cough on people".

We may have a disease that'll be just as lethal, but this time nearly everyone in the world knows the basics about diseases. The global response to COVID hasn't been particularly heartening, but I think that's because it's in that "sweet spot" (more like sour spot...) range where the fatality rate is low enough that many people are not sufficiently cautious and allow it to spread widely, but high enough that it does kill a lot of people.

If we someday have a much more serious disease, like with a black death fatality rate of 30%, I think it's likely to disappear very quickly unless it has an extremely long contagious incubation period. It might to do some serious damage at ground zero, but people will freak out and hide at home if a huge, visible percentage of people die. And this time, (I hope) people won't be running around pointing fingers and spreading the disease in the process.

How much of the black death date rate was due to lack of medical knowledge? Would we really have the same terrible outcome if a similar disease hit today?

Well, all of it was due to the lack of medical knowledge. The bubonic plague hardly kills anyone anymore. The point the parent is making is that we shouldn't compare the societal effects of COVID19 today with that of the bubonic plague when it was at its worst.

But his conclusion seems to have been: we need to worry about what happens if a disease like the black plague hits again: which, well, no we don't. If we need to worry about a future pandemic its one which is quite different the plauge and thus one we are defenseless against.

I believe the point was that we need to worry about a pandemic that is as bad as the black plague was, not that we just need to worry about that disease specifically. The OP even mentioned bird flus as one class that could cause similar devastation.

Why do you think that? We could work to improve our ability to rapidly develop vaccines and stockpile PPE. Those two things would go a long way. Analyzing our supply chains and finding critical points of failure would be another conceivable step.

Why do I think what exactly?

That we would be defenseless against a future pandemic?

that's the opposite of what I meant. I'm skeptical of the possibilty of a pandemic we couldn't defend against.

I think GP was hypothesizing an epidemic that had a black death rate even with our present medical knowledge.

ok, but then the crucial question becomes: are we likely to see that? I tend to think that those scenarios aren't possible anymore, but maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

Well, today we have antibiotics, so no, we do not have to fear the original black death anymore.

But what we also have today, to mitigate the bonus of medicine and hygiene, is fast global travel and very, very crowded cities, compared to the medieval times.

So a highly infectious and deadly disease, we can not treat with antibiotics, would still fuck us up pretty bad.

So I agree, covid was a good trial run for a real epidemic.

> The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse.

Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.

Supply chains on the middle ages were extremely short compared to ours. Good luck feeding a city of, say, 3-million people during a plague that's comparable to the Black Death.

I mean, mankind would probably soldier on, but civilization would take quite a hit.

>> The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse.

Ehhh, depends what you mean by "like". The bubonic plague itself is not rare today; it is more or less expected in wild armadillos, for example. But it is not the calamitous disease to us that it was to medieval Europeans. Modern whites have seen a certain amount of selection for resistance to the plague.

> Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.

On the other hand, I can't support this. The plague very much did collapse medieval European civilization; the accepted structure of society completely disintegrated. Wages for poor laborers skyrocketed. Panicked nobility passed new laws forbidding peasants from leaving the land they worked, and the peasants ignored them. The total loss of so much of the labor force meant that those who survived were much richer -- wheat fields didn't suffer from the plague! -- and radical adjustments to society followed quickly.

I was aware of those effects of the black death, but I guess I don't see it as a "collapse". Maybe I'm wrong or my definition of "collapse" is different from the one accepted by historians.

The nobility still remained the nobility for centuries afterward. The church retained most of its power for another century, until the reformation. Standards of living declined for some time but not that long. A collapse (to me) would have been rather more drastic.

You are comparing apples to oranges.

I think we would have fewer deaths from a second black death than COVID. If the death rate is that high, people will be willing to go to drastic measures to contain it, and it is much easier to tell if someone is infected.

For example, look at how we have handled Ebola outbreaks - despite it being incredibly infectious and deadly, we've never had an outbreak kill even a fraction of the number COVID has.

Wow you got me thinking. 30-60% case fatality rate. Imagine living in those days after the disease was widespread and well known but not understood and one morning just feeing a little sick and you knew wow is this the end.

Wonder if there is a 'good' novel on those days?

Absolutely, The Decameron by Boccaccio, written in 1353 just a few years after the plague struck Italy in 1348: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron

Rather than a novel, it is a collection of 100 short stories of people during the plague. Enjoyable to this day.

Also, the Betrothed (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni, which is set during the 1600s plague. In a very famous chapter, one of the characters finds out he's got the plague, which is pretty close to what the GP describes.

How I was amazed by the pace and energy of 'Betrothed', not one boring minute in all of its 700+ pages. The translation by Bruce Penman available from Penguin is an exhilarating read.

I'm Italian so I read it in the original, but I'm glad to know the English translation does it justice :)

In an SF context, Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is one.

Hence “bless you” after a sneeze. Could be the last thing you say to that person.

> The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse.

Except that we have way better mitigation tools like medicine/hygiene compared to middle-ages. It's not a one variable comparison.