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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- | ||
| A historian’s perspective on plagues | ||
| 2020-03-01 | ||
In case you're interested further, here's a medical paper on the Plague of Athens. They did find one clearly identifiable grave for plague victims, so they're testing the bones. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19787658 What was Plague like, generally? Thucydides described a violent disease that nearly always killed its victims (he himself survived). It began suddenly, with violent pain and high fever. Within hours, victims broke out in sores. They coughed and retched; they had diarrhea and bled. They had spasms of pain or seizure. In some plagues, skin died, becoming black. The Plague of Athens took up to a week to kill someone, while some later plagues, including the Black Death of 1347, killed in as little as 8 hours. Plague was simply the most frightening thing in the world. It’s no accident that Plague is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Revelation. Diseases that rise to the label of Plague attack nearly all body systems at once. They mutate even as they spread, becoming airborne and sometimes defying logic as to how they are transmitted. The amazing thing is that plagues never kill everyone, although there appears to be no reason why they shouldn’t. When we contemplate the horrors of a 60% death rate, which is about the maximum ever suffered in a plague, we must remember that this means 2 out of 5 people never got sick, or were mildly sick and recovered. Their natural resistance to the disease is what eventually ends the plague, since after it returns several times, a majority of survivors have immunity.
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| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #5 Y’all are very welcome. I share her perspectives here from time to time. She also is the lady I’ve mentioned with an undiagnosed form of chronic fatigue and the schizophrenic son who had to kill his grandmother and be imprisoned before he could be forced to get treatment. Altogether one of my heroes, in her own quiet way — if I had half her accomplishments or her strength, I’d have reason indeed to be proud of myself. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2020-03-01 21:48 |
| #4 The normal human body's immune system is constantly killing off various diseases . In China they have been weakened with long term exposure to coal dust, animal dung/dust in the air and etc. To stay healthy avoid China, Seattle, and Los Angeles. |
| Posted by: Thaith Elmeresing6163 2020-03-01 07:22 |
| #3 Neat stuff TW. If anyone is a user of Discord, there is a fantastic full time room on this thing here Alot of intel is now shared over discord. It is a unique backup to twitter and it is fast, timely, and there are alerts. |
| Posted by: newc 2020-03-01 01:37 |
| #2 An ice bath needs to be thrown on the re-infection thing. First, the reports came from China. China is not to be used for this information. Second, most all initial testing kits were faulty and missed the virus the first time or the test was not conducted correctly. We are not shutting down the World because One Person died in the US. |
| Posted by: newc 2020-03-01 01:31 |
| #1 Thank you TW (and historian Ruth Johnston) for this urgently-needed doese of historical perspective. Take yer finger off the panic button, folks. This is not nothing but in also not something of any real consequence in historical terms. |
| Posted by: Lex 2020-03-01 00:48 |