Venkatesh Rao

We’re gonna get a African-women-narrative/Talmudic style story. Circling the subject with widening circles of context, weaving it into space and time. Sounds like fanfic. I’m down. Let’s go.

So apparently global perspective is recent scholarship. In Europe death rate from Spanish Flu was the lowest. WW1 took 2-6x as many lives. But elsewhere SF was much bigger. So opposite pattern of Black Death.

Book has 8 parts with 2-5 chapters each. Part 1 is a history of flu viruses. They date to agriculture since they need higher population densities. More co-adapted to humans than malaria or leprosy, not as exclusively parasitic on us as mumps, measles, rubella.

So birds are thought to be the natural reservoir of flu viruses, and pigs an intermediate host. Makes sense that we’ve had avian and swine flus.

Discussion of how the flu was likely very deadly when it first appeared between 5-12k years ago and adapted to humans. Some discussion of native Americans getting wiped out by European diseases. Dry opening so far, but I appreciate the context setting. Will stop here tonight.

1580 was the first properly documented flu pandemic. 10% of Rome died: 8000. Two in 18th century. 19th century was peak of crowd diseases generally.

Industrial revolution cities “... were unable to sustain themselves— they needed a constant influx of healthy peasants from the countryside to make up for the lives lost to infection. Wars too brough epidemics in their wake.”

1830 and 1889, two flu pandemics in 18th century. So these things are not common. Wonder if there’s been a coronavirus pandemic before SARS-COV-2 and -1.