Corona Daily 490: The Miracle of Our Existence

We are rattled because this is our first experience with a pandemic of this scale. But the world we inhabit has seen many. Throughout history, nothing has killed more humans than viruses, bacteria and parasites. More soldiers have died of infectious diseases than in actual combat.

In the 6^th century, the plague of Justinian killed 50 million people, half of the earth’s population at that time. It started in Egypt and travelled to Constantinople, where at its peak it was killing 10,000 people a day.  

The black death of the 14^th century possibly killed up to 200 million people. The source of both these plagues was infected rats. Each plague killed nearly half of Europe’s population. After the Black Death, Europe needed 200 years to replenish the human loss.

Spanish flu was the last pandemic before penicillin was invented in 1928. Spanish flu lasted a full three years (1918-20) and killed 50 million people. That flu infected every third person on the planet. The estimated economic cost of that pandemic was 4 trillion USD.

Smallpox killed 300 million in the 20^th century alone. In one of its outbreaks, my grandmother lost two siblings, became deaf and mute at the age of six, and was left with a spotted, scarred face for life. Smallpox was devastating. We have seen how easily viruses can enter royal palaces. Smallpox was particularly anti-monarchist. It killed Queen Mary II of England, Emperor Joseph I of Austria, King Luis I of Spain, Tsar Peter II of Russia, Queen Ulrika Elenora of Sweden, and King Louis XV of France.

In 1980, WHO announced the eradication of Smallpox. Despite requests to destroy them, its virus samples are still preserved in labs at Koltsovo (Russia) and Atlanta (USA). An evil politician, in theory, can turn them into a bio-weapon.

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The remarkable news is that despite a calamitous history, each of us managed to come into existence. In the last 100,000 years and more, not a single ancestor of any of us died in infancy or childhood (or we wouldn’t be born). With a lengthy list of pandemics, wars, famines, natural disasters and high child mortality, we must count that as a statistical miracle.

Ravi