Not very likely. Most pathogens are only able to survive outside host for only a limited amount of time. I can't give you exact numbers for Yersinia pestis, but it's certainly not centuries.
One recent example of what you suggest is the recent Anthrax outbreak in Siberia. Though in this situation we are talking 1) about a pathogen that is particularly famous for ability to form spores and survive a long time and 2) frozen state
It can no doubt be treated with an antibiotic, and they've probably determined some that work that are also comparable with humans.
The real trick is to avoid creating and breathing in an aerosol, which has I'm sure killed more than one researcher before he and his doctor realized what was happening, I heard of one such case in the '70s when I was doing work on E. Coli during a summer program involving salmonella. If you get too much lung tissue---lots of surface area---infected too quickly, well, see pneumonic plague, it's anthrax equivalent, which an Air Force flight surgeon's manual said the first clear diagnostic sign from a patient is his sudden death, etc.
And echoing loxs, it's very unlikely they're working with viable bacteria, if they're just sequencing DNA or the like they're far, far from something viable, and I don't believe it creates spores.
I wonder whether these 17th-century strains of bacteria, if they survived and infected someone today, would have less resistance to modern antibiotics than modern strains do. That would make them much easier to manage.
"Modern", sort of, since these antibiotics have generally started from compounds molds etc. use for attacks on bacteria in the same ecological niche, many if not most?? of these counters have by and large been there all along in the modern age of antibiotics, it's just that they now spread a lot more since they give bacteria attacking humans a competitive advantage (few if any of these otherwise help the bacteria, especially unless the plasmid or whatever has a regulatory system to turn it off when not needed).
And many can be countered with standard mutations, i.e. something that messes with the surface protein that transports them inside. When I was doing a bit of E. Coli microbiology in the summer of 1977 the conventional wisdom was for a generic antibiotic, like the colicin we were working with, 1 in a million bacterial would spontaneously develop a mutation (which I further did the grunt work to prove the ones we had were of the surface protein type, by and large). Streptomycin, though, would take 1 in a billion.
Oh, they survived, if you play around with cute rodents in the right parts of the US West you can get yourself a nice case of the plague, look here for an excellent map and more details on cases and deaths per year etc.: https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/
Of course, passing through humans for a half century, and then through these rodents, it won't be quite the same, but...
The average length of intact Y. pestis DNA that researchers are capable of extracting from medieval teeth is something in the order of 55 basepairs.
To put that into perspective - Y. pestis' main chromosome is a little over 4 million basepairs. So it is only broken pieces of code that they can recover, not the whole, intact bacterium. No risk here.
Not exactly always, some of the no doubt distorted by the passage of time reported symptoms don't align with what we know of at least more modern strains of the plague, e.g. stuff more like what's seen with modern hemorrhagic viruses.
They money quote for me, especially relevant to the parent, is:
'The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!'
(but yes, more generally short term thinking has to go both ways - we do things that damage the biosphere because we don't think ahead, but we also think far enough ahead to see the ways the planet (or even just our economy/ecosystem) will react - see plastic degrading bacteria, peak oil)
Lifeforms have profoundly changed the Earth before, and will quite likely do so again.
Meantime, what humans are doing -- not generally maliciously -- to the planet and biosphere has quite profound effects on what sort of life future humans might be able to live. Looking simply at terrestrial vertebrate biomass gives some indication of this (there are many, many other measures): https://m.facebook.com/notes/paul-chefurka/more-thoughts-on-...
And it's quite likely that some form of disease will play a large role in reversing this situation.
I was trying to remind the parent poster that 'saving the planet' is a metaphor at best - ordinarily it should always involve saving humans.
An accidental reversal of the situation as you describe is quite different from the parent's even joking suggestion (as in Dan Brown's 'Inferno' :P) that it would be good to introduce a disease to stop humans from doing more damage.
Aside from the basic moral problems with that approach (genocide?), it would not be surprising if any such disease became striated in its spread along wealth or other social lines, or simply borders and it could stall our progress in finding useful solutions to the problems we've already created.
From a utilitarian perspective, we can turn the problem around and look at, as you suggest, 'a disease which may reverse the situation'. In consistency with my above perspective, I'm all for doing every bit we can to stop such a disease if it crops up - even at a detriment to the biosphere.
Now whether we'll be able to or not is a question we don't yet have an answer to, perhaps. :)
(that said, saving the planet for future humans would be a worthwhile endeavour, if we were any good at looking even a moderate distance ahead - whether we can usefully predict the medium-term effects of almost anything at all is highly debatable however, as suggested by the sibling poster commenting on plastics)
I don't find the distinction you and Carlin make to be productive. Carlin is flat wrong that humans cannot impact that planet, though the question's still open if we can have positive impacts. In at least one case (ozone) we've avoided catastrophe.
The general question I've been focusing on is one of whether or not the Enlightenment and Technological experiments can be continued. If so, there's almost certainly a tremendous trade between standard of living and number of inhabitants possible. Reading I'm doing presently (Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History) suggests that energy requirements of about 2 tons of oil equivalent per person per year are required. I'm thinking that's going to have to come from entirely renewable sources. Those fluxes and conversions are distinctly limited.
Joel Cohen seems to be the author who's done the most detailed analyses of carrying capacity that I've run across (I've found multiple references to his work, I've yet to read it). E.g., http://science.sciencemag.org/content/269/5222/341.long
(I originally included far more thoughts on the topic here, but this is getting dangerously far from my areas of deep knowledge and I shouldn't allow scope creep to have me argue on things beyond my original point).
I'm only trying to argue that arguing that we need to save the planet without taking into account the human context is like arguing that we need to save a distant star. Saving the planet is precisely valuable in most cases due to the second order effect of saving humanity or the biosphere. This was all in response to the various ideas of 'saving the planet' which involve voluntarily gutting humanity, such as the original post I responded to here.
Once again you're talking in generalities citing that 'most people' think a certain way...
...and I'm responding to the tone of the original parent poster /right here/.
That is - the parent poster who suggested just such a human-hostile, planet- (or possibly biosphere-except-humans-) positive approach.
The parent proposes that it might be worth keeping the world in great shape for tomorrow, at the cost of today's humanity. That /may/ be the case, but such measures seem to make relatively little sense when we have such a poor track record of predicting outcomes over macroscopic time periods and predicting higher order effects of our actions. Instead we might be better off just making humanity our first order concern and trying to help humanity itself. Certainly an approach where the first order effect is to harm humanity (a plague, say) should require an incredibly high standard before we consider it, don't you think?
My point in "most people" isn't necessarily even that the presumed statistic is correct, but that litigating the question of what is meant by "saving the planet" is a boring and to me frankly stupid discussion. It doesn't buy you much.
I conceded that there are people who do advocate for eliminating of humans entirely. Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Stephanie McMillan, and Jack Forbes, and their Deep Green Resistance advocate for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green_Resistance It's not a terribly popular view. It is an extant one.
Again: I'm acknowledging the view exists.
On the question of predicting outcomes -- that's something I've been looking at, and I'm starting to conclude that there are models which are more effective than others, though they're not perfectly accurate. Most take an ecological approach, and consider physical effects or carrying capacity. Looking at past predictions, and noting both which are or aren't accurate AND WHY is hugely instructive. What I notice is that a particular viewpoint (generally anti-Malthusian) seems to glory over missed specific benchmark elements (dates, quantities, etc.), without looking at the underlying causal bases.
Using the inability to predict long-term outcomes as the justification for shifting the basis of what you're claiming to be impossible predictions from the ecosystem as a whole to humans alone doesn't, on brief reflection, seem to offer much. "We can't predict accurately, so let's predict inaccurately on topic B rather than topic A."
I'm not sold.
The question of how to ramp down human population * consumption to a sustainable level is a very hard one. I'll point back to the diagram of terrestrial biomass I posted higher up this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453058). We're looking at a situation in which:
1. Humans and their livestock represent about 5x the long-term sustainable terrestrial vertebrate biomass of the planet.
2. Humans alone represent nearly 2x the long-term TVB.
3. We achieve this through the exploitation of massive amounts of stored energy, consumed at the rate of about 5 million years of original accumulation per single current year of use.
4. The environmental impacts of that rate of use itself pose considerable environmental threats.
5. There are numerous other binding ecological constraints we're facing either currently or in the near future.
"Helping humanity itself" is going to involve something thinning the herd considerably. I've got reasons for suspecting endogenous mechansisms are messy, though exogenous ones also seem that way.
Either way, humans now live in a period where our most pressing and clearly identifiable existential threat is ourselves, through sheer mass of numbers.
There is a difference between acknowledging (and understanding, and appreciating) the problem, and in coming up with a solution to it. But the first is a prerequisite for the second.
The author of the chart I showed above has a "ladder of awareness" which I find instructive. His view generally is rather Zen. I've not fully bought it, but it strikes me as strongly considered. Paul Chefurka:
To me, OP's comment is always a 'Put your money where your mouth is' kind of thing. Think there are too many people and some need to die off horribly? Step right up. I won't even be upset if you choose a more pleasant method than bubonic plague.
And certainly, don't let us catch you having children.
Defoe's account of people being buried in heaps is not necessarily at odds with this excavation of neat coffin burials.
The plague didn't instantly reach full intensity on day one. During the early phases of the epidemic, deaths were not yet widespread enough to require mass graves, and burials proceeded semi-normally.
During the later, more intense phases, things were much worse. There were both more bodies needing to be buried and fewer available funerary service providers such as coffinmakers and undertakers around to deal with them, since many had themselves either died of the plague or fled the city. Faced with growing heaps of rotting infectious corpses in the streets, hastily dug mass graves were often resorted to by the survivors.
I'm sure there were socio-economic factors in burial as well. I suspect the lower class were much more likely to be thrown into mass graves than more well to do merchants
Back then, most would have roots in some farm. Heck, that's true for many many people today, my parents, for example, my mother's home is still a working farm....
Now, if you had to become a serf again to go back to the farm....
Of course, not all poor people were confined to the city. As you say, some came from a village where they still had relatives... who were not going to be very happy when a walking disease vector showed up from London and recent exposure to the Great Plague, even if he had a few pennies to contribute to his upkeep.
Many were, however, unable to leave because they had nowhere to go. Many came from families that had been in the city for generations and now had no contact with their ancestral villages. There was no Facebook or telephones, and poor people could usually neither write nor afford postage even if they could write. Moreover, families were frequently fractured. Unwanted children were simply turned out into the street, or they might wind up there when their parents died. They then had no clue who their relatives were or what village they'd come from.
Classical medieval serfdom had largely died out by the 17th century in England, but the villages were still often grindingly poor. There wasn't enough food to feed the (poor) people who lived there normally. Even during normal times, some penniless distant cousin showing up from London would often be despised as yet another mouth to feed (which is why they'd moved to the city in the first place.)
Many others just couldn't afford the trip. The sheer level of extreme poverty in which most Londoners lived at the time is hard to imagine for westerners today. Travel itself was expensive and dangerous during normal times, even for those who had some place to go. The plague made it more expensive and more dangerous.
For bottom-rung workers ekeing out a marginal sub-subsistence existence, for people who went hungry several days each week anyway during the best times, hiring a horse was out of the question. Their only option was to walk, perhaps for weeks, with whatever food and money they could carry. Poor people (read: almost everyone) had no access to banking services, so if they lost that money, they were screwed. (This wasn't a problem for most, as they didn't have any money to begin with.)
They not only faced highway robbery at every turn, but hostile peasants. No rural village was opening its arms to take in people who had just come directly from plague-ridden London. Such people were seen as dangerous threats, walking disease vectors likely to infect the whole town and kill everyone if they were not immediately driven off.
Wealthy people, by contrast, had horses, carriages, servants, guards, private food stores, and gated country estates.
Ah, yeah, I'm sure you're more in the right, although I suspect you underestimate people's resourcefulness.
Somehow I missed the "this is the 1665 plague" (and forgot about, for example, Newton went back home when Cambridge University closed as a precaution), and was thinking back to the big initial wave in the 14th Century (the Black Death) when England and London weren't quite as advanced; kinda scary it kept hitting in waves for 3+ centuries....
Defoes version was a novel, though written in the form of a diary (it may have been based on the diary of his uncle apparently) so which bits are accurate and which are inventions of the author are tricky to determine.
Samuel Pepys was another diary writer at that time. Pretty interesting read, and you can get a quick overview of how much he was occupied by the plague from the following site:
It seems to me, the people (inn-keepers, etc) were way too accepting of the refugees. They should have been barricading the town gates. Many of them paid with their lives, and their family's lives.
I'm still reading A Journal of the Plague Year, it's fascinating and surprisingly modern in tone, despite the archaic language. It's like one of those zombie apocalypse films, except this guy was living it for real. Recommended :)
Another example might be the over-diagnosis of tertiary neurosyphilis as the cause of mental illness and death, e.g. in some of my recent reading great and legitimate doubt was placed on that being a cause of the death of Winston Churchill's father. We now know there's a host of causes, many of which aren't (yet known to be) infectious.
Although we must be careful, in one of my more interesting jobs, building a full text database for Year Book Medical Publishers (a part of Time ... -Life? Time as in the LA Times back then), the leading article for the general book for that year was on the proof of gastrointestinal ulcer being caused by a bacteria. The editor of that entry figuratively smiled about "taking away another disease from" ... whichever specialists assigned it all to stress (which of course can predispose someone to getting an infection).
The novel "World War Z" basically touches on this resemblance. The author seems to have read lots of information about what real humans due when plagues and diseases strike and how human society reacts, and then transposed it to zombie apocalypse, which gives it a strange kind of authenticity.
The book wasn't very film-able, so the movie they made from it was quite different in approach.
I've also heard there's a non-fiction book about the "Spanish flu" outbreak that basically reads like a zombie film (e.g. one interesting tidbit, they call it the Spanish Flu because that is where the first reported cases were, but it didn't start there, the other countries just suppressed the information because they were at war)
Stopping the people won't help much, the Bubonic Plague generally isn't spread from person to person but from rat to rat via fleas which only go after humans once all the rats are dead of the plague. Several cities in the 14th century plague did try to quarantine themselves without much success. The pneumatic version of the plague which cropped up in some northern areas could be spread directly from person to person and, IIRC, the septic version too via the fleas that typically prayed on humans. But those caused a minority of the plague deaths.
Defoe spells out that many of those who fled took the plague with them into the shires. There were also attempts in each parish to deny that plague was killing people - it was put down to other ailments as far as possible. Seems illogical to us, but if you are inclined to believe plagues are divine punishment, you might hope to get on top of it by prayer and right-living: "trying to cleanse the city in both moral and practical terms".
I am happy with every new ancient DNA sequence of plague that becomes available. Combined, they can be used to figure out the way the disease spread across Eurasia and persisted in Europe.
That said, I would like these news articles to actually link to the scientific paper, or if the paper is not published yet/still under review, at least mention that.
Eh, isn't that's kinda hard and dangerous, for the simplest way is to infect animals with these strains, and I kinda doubt any humans are volunteering to play their part....
Just having a DNA sequence is quite some distance from the proteins it produces, the regulatory system that governs what, when and how much, and the effect of them on us poor animals. But this has got to be a hot area of research....
46 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadThe people in the pictures do not appear to wear much protection.
One recent example of what you suggest is the recent Anthrax outbreak in Siberia. Though in this situation we are talking 1) about a pathogen that is particularly famous for ability to form spores and survive a long time and 2) frozen state
The real trick is to avoid creating and breathing in an aerosol, which has I'm sure killed more than one researcher before he and his doctor realized what was happening, I heard of one such case in the '70s when I was doing work on E. Coli during a summer program involving salmonella. If you get too much lung tissue---lots of surface area---infected too quickly, well, see pneumonic plague, it's anthrax equivalent, which an Air Force flight surgeon's manual said the first clear diagnostic sign from a patient is his sudden death, etc.
And echoing loxs, it's very unlikely they're working with viable bacteria, if they're just sequencing DNA or the like they're far, far from something viable, and I don't believe it creates spores.
And many can be countered with standard mutations, i.e. something that messes with the surface protein that transports them inside. When I was doing a bit of E. Coli microbiology in the summer of 1977 the conventional wisdom was for a generic antibiotic, like the colicin we were working with, 1 in a million bacterial would spontaneously develop a mutation (which I further did the grunt work to prove the ones we had were of the surface protein type, by and large). Streptomycin, though, would take 1 in a billion.
Of course, passing through humans for a half century, and then through these rodents, it won't be quite the same, but...
To put that into perspective - Y. pestis' main chromosome is a little over 4 million basepairs. So it is only broken pieces of code that they can recover, not the whole, intact bacterium. No risk here.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v478/n7370/full/nature1...
The official third and most recent pandemic started in 1855 in China and reached the US by the turn of the century, so we have much more solid reports of that strain's behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_(disease)#Third_pandemi...
(no affiliation or particular interest in George Carlin, just remembered the quote (via Stargate episode 'Brain Storm'))
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/does-newly-discovered...
'The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!'
(but yes, more generally short term thinking has to go both ways - we do things that damage the biosphere because we don't think ahead, but we also think far enough ahead to see the ways the planet (or even just our economy/ecosystem) will react - see plastic degrading bacteria, peak oil)
Meantime, what humans are doing -- not generally maliciously -- to the planet and biosphere has quite profound effects on what sort of life future humans might be able to live. Looking simply at terrestrial vertebrate biomass gives some indication of this (there are many, many other measures): https://m.facebook.com/notes/paul-chefurka/more-thoughts-on-...
And it's quite likely that some form of disease will play a large role in reversing this situation.
I was trying to remind the parent poster that 'saving the planet' is a metaphor at best - ordinarily it should always involve saving humans.
An accidental reversal of the situation as you describe is quite different from the parent's even joking suggestion (as in Dan Brown's 'Inferno' :P) that it would be good to introduce a disease to stop humans from doing more damage.
Aside from the basic moral problems with that approach (genocide?), it would not be surprising if any such disease became striated in its spread along wealth or other social lines, or simply borders and it could stall our progress in finding useful solutions to the problems we've already created.
From a utilitarian perspective, we can turn the problem around and look at, as you suggest, 'a disease which may reverse the situation'. In consistency with my above perspective, I'm all for doing every bit we can to stop such a disease if it crops up - even at a detriment to the biosphere.
Now whether we'll be able to or not is a question we don't yet have an answer to, perhaps. :)
(that said, saving the planet for future humans would be a worthwhile endeavour, if we were any good at looking even a moderate distance ahead - whether we can usefully predict the medium-term effects of almost anything at all is highly debatable however, as suggested by the sibling poster commenting on plastics)
The general question I've been focusing on is one of whether or not the Enlightenment and Technological experiments can be continued. If so, there's almost certainly a tremendous trade between standard of living and number of inhabitants possible. Reading I'm doing presently (Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History) suggests that energy requirements of about 2 tons of oil equivalent per person per year are required. I'm thinking that's going to have to come from entirely renewable sources. Those fluxes and conversions are distinctly limited.
Joel Cohen seems to be the author who's done the most detailed analyses of carrying capacity that I've run across (I've found multiple references to his work, I've yet to read it). E.g., http://science.sciencemag.org/content/269/5222/341.long
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ACohen%2C+Joel+E.&fq=&...
I'm only trying to argue that arguing that we need to save the planet without taking into account the human context is like arguing that we need to save a distant star. Saving the planet is precisely valuable in most cases due to the second order effect of saving humanity or the biosphere. This was all in response to the various ideas of 'saving the planet' which involve voluntarily gutting humanity, such as the original post I responded to here.
Not for all though, definitely: http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collaps...
http://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/New-Political-Map.jpg
...and I'm responding to the tone of the original parent poster /right here/.
That is - the parent poster who suggested just such a human-hostile, planet- (or possibly biosphere-except-humans-) positive approach.
The parent proposes that it might be worth keeping the world in great shape for tomorrow, at the cost of today's humanity. That /may/ be the case, but such measures seem to make relatively little sense when we have such a poor track record of predicting outcomes over macroscopic time periods and predicting higher order effects of our actions. Instead we might be better off just making humanity our first order concern and trying to help humanity itself. Certainly an approach where the first order effect is to harm humanity (a plague, say) should require an incredibly high standard before we consider it, don't you think?
I conceded that there are people who do advocate for eliminating of humans entirely. Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Stephanie McMillan, and Jack Forbes, and their Deep Green Resistance advocate for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green_Resistance It's not a terribly popular view. It is an extant one.
Again: I'm acknowledging the view exists.
On the question of predicting outcomes -- that's something I've been looking at, and I'm starting to conclude that there are models which are more effective than others, though they're not perfectly accurate. Most take an ecological approach, and consider physical effects or carrying capacity. Looking at past predictions, and noting both which are or aren't accurate AND WHY is hugely instructive. What I notice is that a particular viewpoint (generally anti-Malthusian) seems to glory over missed specific benchmark elements (dates, quantities, etc.), without looking at the underlying causal bases.
Using the inability to predict long-term outcomes as the justification for shifting the basis of what you're claiming to be impossible predictions from the ecosystem as a whole to humans alone doesn't, on brief reflection, seem to offer much. "We can't predict accurately, so let's predict inaccurately on topic B rather than topic A."
I'm not sold.
The question of how to ramp down human population * consumption to a sustainable level is a very hard one. I'll point back to the diagram of terrestrial biomass I posted higher up this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453058). We're looking at a situation in which:
1. Humans and their livestock represent about 5x the long-term sustainable terrestrial vertebrate biomass of the planet.
2. Humans alone represent nearly 2x the long-term TVB.
3. We achieve this through the exploitation of massive amounts of stored energy, consumed at the rate of about 5 million years of original accumulation per single current year of use.
4. The environmental impacts of that rate of use itself pose considerable environmental threats.
5. There are numerous other binding ecological constraints we're facing either currently or in the near future.
"Helping humanity itself" is going to involve something thinning the herd considerably. I've got reasons for suspecting endogenous mechansisms are messy, though exogenous ones also seem that way.
Either way, humans now live in a period where our most pressing and clearly identifiable existential threat is ourselves, through sheer mass of numbers.
There is a difference between acknowledging (and understanding, and appreciating) the problem, and in coming up with a solution to it. But the first is a prerequisite for the second.
The author of the chart I showed above has a "ladder of awareness" which I find instructive. His view generally is rather Zen. I've not fully bought it, but it strikes me as strongly considered. Paul Chefurka:
http://paulchefurka.ca/LadderOfAwareness.html
(see more at http://paulchefurka.ca)
And certainly, don't let us catch you having children.
The plague didn't instantly reach full intensity on day one. During the early phases of the epidemic, deaths were not yet widespread enough to require mass graves, and burials proceeded semi-normally.
During the later, more intense phases, things were much worse. There were both more bodies needing to be buried and fewer available funerary service providers such as coffinmakers and undertakers around to deal with them, since many had themselves either died of the plague or fled the city. Faced with growing heaps of rotting infectious corpses in the streets, hastily dug mass graves were often resorted to by the survivors.
Back then, most would have roots in some farm. Heck, that's true for many many people today, my parents, for example, my mother's home is still a working farm....
Now, if you had to become a serf again to go back to the farm....
Many were, however, unable to leave because they had nowhere to go. Many came from families that had been in the city for generations and now had no contact with their ancestral villages. There was no Facebook or telephones, and poor people could usually neither write nor afford postage even if they could write. Moreover, families were frequently fractured. Unwanted children were simply turned out into the street, or they might wind up there when their parents died. They then had no clue who their relatives were or what village they'd come from.
Classical medieval serfdom had largely died out by the 17th century in England, but the villages were still often grindingly poor. There wasn't enough food to feed the (poor) people who lived there normally. Even during normal times, some penniless distant cousin showing up from London would often be despised as yet another mouth to feed (which is why they'd moved to the city in the first place.)
Many others just couldn't afford the trip. The sheer level of extreme poverty in which most Londoners lived at the time is hard to imagine for westerners today. Travel itself was expensive and dangerous during normal times, even for those who had some place to go. The plague made it more expensive and more dangerous.
For bottom-rung workers ekeing out a marginal sub-subsistence existence, for people who went hungry several days each week anyway during the best times, hiring a horse was out of the question. Their only option was to walk, perhaps for weeks, with whatever food and money they could carry. Poor people (read: almost everyone) had no access to banking services, so if they lost that money, they were screwed. (This wasn't a problem for most, as they didn't have any money to begin with.)
They not only faced highway robbery at every turn, but hostile peasants. No rural village was opening its arms to take in people who had just come directly from plague-ridden London. Such people were seen as dangerous threats, walking disease vectors likely to infect the whole town and kill everyone if they were not immediately driven off.
Wealthy people, by contrast, had horses, carriages, servants, guards, private food stores, and gated country estates.
Somehow I missed the "this is the 1665 plague" (and forgot about, for example, Newton went back home when Cambridge University closed as a precaution), and was thinking back to the big initial wave in the 14th Century (the Black Death) when England and London weren't quite as advanced; kinda scary it kept hitting in waves for 3+ centuries....
https://goldin.shinyapps.io/Search_Pepys/
(enter plague as keyword, click on the tab marked histogram, or browse the entries)
It's only in the last 150 years that it gained scientific acceptance.
It took a while for the scientific community to accept that some diseases are caused by a lack of vitamins, for example.
Although we must be careful, in one of my more interesting jobs, building a full text database for Year Book Medical Publishers (a part of Time ... -Life? Time as in the LA Times back then), the leading article for the general book for that year was on the proof of gastrointestinal ulcer being caused by a bacteria. The editor of that entry figuratively smiled about "taking away another disease from" ... whichever specialists assigned it all to stress (which of course can predispose someone to getting an infection).
Or that the majority of the human body by cell count is actually composed of bacteria...
The book wasn't very film-able, so the movie they made from it was quite different in approach.
I've also heard there's a non-fiction book about the "Spanish flu" outbreak that basically reads like a zombie film (e.g. one interesting tidbit, they call it the Spanish Flu because that is where the first reported cases were, but it didn't start there, the other countries just suppressed the information because they were at war)
That said, I would like these news articles to actually link to the scientific paper, or if the paper is not published yet/still under review, at least mention that.
Just having a DNA sequence is quite some distance from the proteins it produces, the regulatory system that governs what, when and how much, and the effect of them on us poor animals. But this has got to be a hot area of research....
Thank god, what a relief !
To be frank, looking at the pictures of students working on site,that very question crossed my mind.