Arizona resident dies from the plague
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
What is reported, in this article and many others, is that the person arrived at the hospital and died there the same day. There is no mention in any article I have read that the symptoms began less than 24 hours before the death.
> The victim was rushed to Flagstaff Medical Center, showing severe symptoms, and died the same day.
But sure, that doesn't rule out that the symptoms became severere, or that there weren't different lesser symptoms beforehand. It does make it sound like it was all pretty immediate though.
They could have been ill at home for several days or weeks until someone decided to call for help; then when first responders arrived, they saw it was serious and rushed the patient to the medical center.
The local reporting just said the patient died the same day they sought care, without saying anything about when the illness may have started.
Such velocity is possible but rare. I've seen people die from necrotizing fasciitis, for example, that died at such a velocity (1-2 days). Granted it's an extremely rare infection like amoeba of the brain.
Do you mean 'naturally' by their own selection, or some external means?
Lime disease has a similar relationship with predators that eat mice, so let's also keep an eye out for the owls and snakes.
Reduces spread and increases evolutionary pressure to increase resistance and possibly even become immune.
Selection would favor pathogens that instead specialize for hosts that are hard to get rid of. Mice, cockroaches, prairie dogs...
So you’re going on a walk one day, they seem friendly, people like handling cute animals… bada big bada boom
According to him, about one person dies each year from it.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/plague-do...
(I am making popcorn, in preparation for the inevitable administration schism and late night TweetRants between the "ban masks at all costs because what about her emails" and "profiteer from selling plague masks to the CDC under contracts bought with campaign donations" factions. I predict red plague masks with MAGA logos.)
How the hell humanity managed to last so long without antibiotics is mindboggling.
But they did eventually connect plague outbreaks to rats, and killed the rats in the name of public health.
Today we have very effective antibiotics, better knowledge of the body to offer supportive care, and even knowledge about how the plague is transmitted so we can have more effective public health actions.
The implied condescension hits hard after the Covid masking debacle.
Covidian sympathetic magic (wear a strip of cloth over your mouth but not your nose to appease the germ gods) doesn't.
Frankly, I’m sad masks aren’t still more of a thing. I don’t want to wear one all the time, but if you’re sick and need to be in a public place, throw one on out of consideration for your peers.
I thought about making a comment on essential oils in my original comment, but chickened out.
The thing with the masks is exactly the same as if public shopping efficiency authorities had consistently put out the large-scale message that “bags” work to carry groceries but conflating mesh bags with non-perforated bags; Yes, mesh bags do tend to get upwards of 30% of the objects you purchase to your home. There’s an underlying insult to common sense and people are actually not stupid.
Likewise, I would add "obviously": I have never seen "obvious" used to describe anything which is obvious, only things which are not.
The phrase "common sense" is even worse, as about half the time it points to claims that are in fact false.
So, in this case, surgical masks: you say it's "obvious" they're not good enough and compare them to a mesh bag. Perhaps they are that bad, but it's not obvious, and "common sense"* suggests to me that surgeons, who are necessarily working with unwell and often immunocompromised people, will desire something that doesn't let one of the surgical team put a random bacterial mix into someone's new kidney when they sneeze.
* I am aware of the irony; and yes, despite this I can also name a famous example where surgeons collectively were very wrong
I chose my words carefully. Those are actually the right words.
It is plainly obvious and indisputable that the academic record shows a swath of scientifically acquired data on aerosol transmission and masks-which-do-not-gape-at-the-sides. This basis would have informed a completely different approach and result to public health authorities’ education and emission of sensible information to raise common sense to an ethical standard, if public health authorities operated… non-debacularly, to choose a word.
If they had operated responsibly.
Years ago, I read a roleplaying book ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkworld ) that had a throwaway comment that many ancient civilizations had decent medical care for injuries, but good care for disease was much less common. Ancient Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, Mayans, and others mastered various forms of surgery. They even recognized that some materials (such as silver staples) were better for closing wounds because they would be less likely to get infected.
But disease was always much harder to understand. It's usually hard to tell if somebody got better because of treatment, or because they were just going to get better ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_touch ), and (sadly) if everybody got the same treatment, it wasn't always obvious when the treatment killed people ( https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e... : George Washington died because he received drastic treatment for a sore throat; including having a doctor remove about half of the blood in his body. People at the time didn't realize that the treatment was the problem, they just believed that sore throats were incredibly dangerous ("George Washington then called for Tobias Lear. Lear recorded that Washington told him, '... I believed from the first that the disorder would prove fatal'")).
I honestly once thought it would be cool to have a TV series based on the Knights Hospitallers, but realized they’d just be bleeding people in every episode (different time period, same idea: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/chirugeon ). Our understanding of germs is very recent. The 1896 book “The Chemistry of Cookery” ( https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53458 ) says “I should add that this germ theory of disease is disputed by some who maintain that the source of the diseases attributed to such microbia is chemical poison, the microbia (i.e. little living things) are merely accidental, or creatures fed on the disease-producing poison.” That is, even at the end of the 1800s, whether bacteria caused illness was still disputed.
During the black death, the people did the best they could with the knowledge they had. But we can do better with the knowledge we have, and that's easy to prove based on comparing modern recovery rates to what they were in Europe in the 1300s. It would be depressing if medical science hadn’t improved in the last 700 years.
I can't find a reference to it now, though, and if there was a term for the exaggerated response I don't remember it.
It's possible that my memory confused a harsher fever response to normal illnesses with familial mediterranean fever:
https://www.genome.gov/news/news-release/genomic-variation-c...
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-bla...
Apparently there's a couple of cases every year, but I've got to say that amidst the return of measles and various other diseases, the cuts in healthcare, this is not a great look.
>Symptoms often begin within a week of infection and may include fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes, nausea and weakness.
If I had symptoms like that I think I'd just stay at home and not visit a doctor yet. Certainly not within 24 hours of them showing up.
Also, medical practitioners may not immediately put on their bioharzard protection suite when someone walks in with swollen lymph nodes and nausea.
That's why it is important to take news of incidents and location of the occurrence into consideration, both as a patient and as medical staff.
Up here kids are not permitted to go to school without it. There’s some exceptions but they’re, in practice, very difficult to secure.
Most parents still get their kids vaccinated. You hear about the few oddballs that don't when their kids get sick and it's trumpted all over the news as if it's a new pandemic.
Canada obviously had only 1/10th the population. Your attempted connection to domestic policies is spurious.
There’s likely numerous other variables to explore.
I'm saying it's part of a pattern. The rise in measles, after it was practically eliminated, is obviously caused by the rise in anti-vax beliefs. And that plus the other factors I mentioned are part of a pattern of carelessness and misinformation around public health. All of it put together, these are extremely worrisome developments.
Is there a rise of anti-vax beliefs in Mexico?
Probably anyway, there is some debate on that. But it’s pretty likely.
"Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected rodents. "
Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me fleas
People
Learn
About
Germs
Using
Epidemiology
> The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats.
The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average social group, family or community, one would hear of only a very small minority of people having actually died. It was, comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of pure clinical impact.
Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so many years now completely erased from your personal world. All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone
There's entire chapters of this:
"The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. "
Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.
Maybe you’re thinking of The Andromeda Strain?
This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
This is a silly and regularly disproven trope.
For an extensive and approachable start: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
When a population spends a generations enjoying a world without all these diseases, they lose the social herd immunity to the intellectual stupidity that's proliferating today, now helped along by increasingly prominent figures, including one government health department head [1][2][3].
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/08/nx...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-health-secr...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Throughout history, war has always begotten more war. Look at the Middle East today: by your logic, it should be the most peaceful place on Earth by now, given how all of the people born there for the last 50 years had been through war (and often famine etc). And yet many of them are actively seeking more war to right the wrongs of the war before, or just because they see their neighbors are weak and it's a good chance to invade them and "rebuild our historic lands".
Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always thrived.
Most of the men involved in this were pretty well off, for instance. Big trucks, nice houses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
Hardly oppressed people.
I swear if the Boston Tea Party happened today it would be blamed on misinformation on social media
Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.
I'm pretty sure that abysmal health options, food insecurity to the point of famine always being just a stone's throw or single bad season away, and grinding poverty all created plenty of stress. The vast majority of people at the time just had no IG Reels with which to vent about their crisis mode for posterity. I just can't imagine any random modern person's level of stress being somehow worse.
As for lack of direction. Life in those times for a vast majority had a simple direction: labor and toil intensely until you die of old age/disease in the same place you were born, rarely straying more than a few miles from those horizons. I'd call today's self-created "lack of direction" pretty preferable to that.
It used to be a thing that people would have nervous breakdowns (panic attack) before checking the mail if they were worried about some impending news. Such as a son at war or a sick relative etc. Now we are simply in that state at pretty much any given time.
The Black Death was so big that people struggled to comprehend it at the time, too.
Idk where that "small minority" is but it sounds like you might not value your friends very highly.
Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold.
That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.
The IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.
Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
Doesn't mean it wasn't deadly during the initial wave.
From US Excess Deaths Continued to Rise Even After the COVID-19 Pandemic | SPH https://share.google/RSjwObWdN7bwwJ5od
The COVID-19 pandemic sharply exacerbated the rise in US deaths in 2020 and 2021, more so than in other countries, and with long-lasting consequences that continue to be realized. But the persistent disparity in US mortality in comparison to its peers is largely driven by crises that began long before the pandemic.
How I value my friends has nothing to do with the death toll and mortality rate I saw anecdotally, of nearly nobody I know dying from it out of hundreds of people of many ages that I knew at the time. Do you imagine that me valuing my friendships more or less somehow changes the clinical mortality stats for a carefully monitored virus? Really?
Also, COVID wasn't a light cold, but for many people, the vast majority in fact, its symptoms were moderate to mild and far from fatal. Again, this isn't politics of any kind talking, it's just the raw numbers from any reliable source you care to look at. IFR wasn't anywhere close to 10% by the way, as you say further down. Most people, by far, with COVID, were never hospitalized for it (that would have been impossible considering what percentage of the population eventually got it) and the IFR rate among them wasn't 10%. I'd truly love to see your source for that whopper.
Globally, in absolute averaged total, as far as any source I've seen indicates, COVID had/has an IFR that roughly breaks down as follows: This is from the National Institute of Health btw.
"For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups."
In any case, all of this deviates slightly from a more basic point there's simply no comparison between COVID and the Black Death, in no scenario or circumstance, and mentioning that is not denying that COVID could be dangerous. It's just a statement of obvious facts about how much, much more horrific one of those two pandemics was historically.
All of my friends, extended family and friends of friends got Covid. Nobody died. The only people that died had pre-existing conditions.
To the vast majority of the population, it was similar to a bad cold.
So even when warned (and people were warned) often the people bringing the warnings could spread the disease anyway.
My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
I was more referring to the intense fear and constant undercurrent of death that permeated urban communities of young gay men at the time. As it did mostly affect young men, these were folks who were otherwise in the prime of their lives physically, and then when they got sick the physical wasting in the end was often pretty extreme. And it was made all the more difficult by the fact that society just kinda went on as normal (or worse, argued that AIDS was "killing all the right people").
At the very least, what I'd like to see from news sites is using a LLM to synthesize the most recent/relevant stories to generate some sort of blurb explaining the topic for a given page.
That is, if a human can't be bothered to do it themselves.