Pandemics are not new to human history

These have occurred from time to time among them cholera, bubonic plague, smallpox, and influenza. These were some of the most brutal killers in human history. When these diseases cross national borders they become pandemics. The smallpox has killed between 300-500 million people in its 12,000 years existence.

The story is told in Genesis that God revealed to Abraham that Sodom and Gomorrah are to be destroyed for their grave sins. It is surmised that bolts of thunder and lightning would ravage the two cities. Abraham is said to have pleaded  for the lives of any righteous people living there, especially the lives of his nephew, Lot, and his family.

God agrees to spare the cities if 10 righteous people can be found. Two angels are sent to Lot in Sodom but are met with a wicked mob who are then struck blind by the angelic guests. Finding only Lot and his family as righteous among the inhabitants, the angels warn Lot to quickly evacuate the city and to not look back. As they flee the destruction, Lot’s wife looks back upon the city and is turned into a pillar of salt.

But what evil could be so punished and need to be destroyed?

But in time and more research has been made particularly in Judaism and certain branches of Christianity modern studies have interpreted that it is the inhabitants’ lack of hospitality, not their homosexuality, that gives offence to God.

Ezekiel 16:49 mentions the inhabitants’ refusal to care for the poor despite their prosperity, which is taken as further evidence that homosexuality is not the cause of their damnation. This interpretation is at the back of the inhospitality to migrants in our time and maybe the reason for the pandemic we are experiencing.

David Quammen’s Spillover is a rousing wake-up call when he wrote that the complex web of microbial ecosystems through which humanity stumbles blindly. He adds that most of the microbes mind their own business, but occasionally we blunder into their finely tuned arrangements for survival and provoke the spillover of a pathogen from its usual animal host to us. It takes time for them to find a sustainable way to colonise their new host, or hosts, so the initial fallout can be carnage – a trail of gorilla carcasses in an African forest, for example, that heralds an outbreak of Ebola in people.

“Not all pathogens acquire the ability to spread easily between humans, but if they do, then a pandemic – an epidemic that encompasses several countries or continents – becomes possible. In the 14th century, long before people connected infection with germs, one or more varieties of plague reduced the population of Europe by as much as half. Philip Ziegler’s classic account of that disaster, The Black Death, shines a light into the medieval mind, revealing how mystical and often paranoid explanations produced cults of self-flagellation and the burning of Jews.”

The stigmatisation of the other has always accompanied pandemics, but so have compassion and heroism. A literary sub-genre is dedicated to the doctors and scientists who have ventured to the centre of pandemics to take on the invisible enemy.

Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains  tells the story of how Paul Farmer, a Harvard professor of health who finds his vocation fighting AIDS and TB in impoverished communities in Haiti, and who sleeps no more than a couple of hours a night because, as he tells Kidder, while he’s sleeping, people are dying. This is also true in today’s coronavirus pandemic with nurses and doctors taking the brunt of working with sick patients 24 hours a day.

Pandemics bring out the best and worst in people. I am not joining the panic buying which to me is inconsiderate when people with money stack up their trolleys with food without a thought of others who will be left behind. Have enough but no more.

At a recent meeting in Pagcor what was foremost in our minds was just how much rice and water to distribute to the poor. Very much and yet not enough if we think how many poor there are who will not be able to eat when food becomes impossible to get. The communities will divide themselves in a menace that brings out the best and worst in people.

There are stories of this division of those who will think more of helping others first and only then will turn to their own.

Writers have used the behavior of human beings in pandemics. Philip Roth’s novel Nemesis is one. “Polio is on the prowl in Newark in the summer of 1944, and teacher Bucky Cantor’s girlfriend begs him to leave the city for the polio-free summer camp where she is working. Duty obliges him to stay with the kids in his charge, however, and when he finally does reach the camp, the disease follows him.”

Another exception is Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter’s jewel of a novel based on her experience of falling ill during the 1918 flu pandemic. Fifty million died – but she did her writerly duty, and gave us a glimpse of the suffering behind that number. Above all, she managed to convey the grief and in some cases the guilt of survivors who woke into “the dead cold light of tomorrow.”

We now have examples to verify that the coronavirus is pandemic. It is not just confined to animals but are spread from person to person. Not all pathogens acquire the ability to spread easily between humans, but if they do, then a pandemic – an epidemic that encompasses several countries or continents.