> 12 trading ships from Black Sea ports made desperately incompetent efforts to dock alongside the harbour walls. Then the reason became devastatingly clear; very few of their crews were still alive. The living were emaciated skeletons, covered with black boils that oozed blood and pus.
Can’t imagine what that must have been like to witness in medieval Italy.
It was facinating to see airlines continue to fly into ebola zones eventho they barely had passengers.
Even if all seats are full they dont make earth shaking profit that cant be avoided. The economy doesnt require doing it. The risk benefit ratio is off the chart.
People making such decisions should really be behind bars? I cant think of a better way to kill. Just send some plague ships and it will make short work.
Slots at airports like London Heathrow are hotly contested commodities with price tags in the millions and come with "use it or lose it" rules attached. If you stop flying a route temporarily, you may lose it permanently.
Regarding the Spanish (or Kansas) flu, there is some evidence suggesting that the second wave was much deadlier than the first because of an unusual practice connected to World War I:
Soldiers infected with more virulent strains were more likely to be shipped to military hospitals, while those infected with less virulent strains were more likely to remain in the trenches.
The military hospitals were much more active vectors of transmission than the bays of the trenches, so the normal pattern of transmission was inverted, with the more virulent strains spreading faster than the less virulent ones.
Under normal conditions, the very sick would stay home while the less sick would go to work, which would tend to push highly virulent viruses toward becoming less virulent over time.
This reminds me of the fact that hospital-acquired pneumonia is the leading cause of death in ICUs in the US.
Among people who are already going to die, the thing that kills them the most is an opportunistic bacterial pneumonia that barely even exists outside of hospitals, or other compromised patients.
Can’t imagine what that must have been like to witness in medieval Italy.
Even if all seats are full they dont make earth shaking profit that cant be avoided. The economy doesnt require doing it. The risk benefit ratio is off the chart.
People making such decisions should really be behind bars? I cant think of a better way to kill. Just send some plague ships and it will make short work.
Soldiers infected with more virulent strains were more likely to be shipped to military hospitals, while those infected with less virulent strains were more likely to remain in the trenches.
The military hospitals were much more active vectors of transmission than the bays of the trenches, so the normal pattern of transmission was inverted, with the more virulent strains spreading faster than the less virulent ones.
Under normal conditions, the very sick would stay home while the less sick would go to work, which would tend to push highly virulent viruses toward becoming less virulent over time.
Among people who are already going to die, the thing that kills them the most is an opportunistic bacterial pneumonia that barely even exists outside of hospitals, or other compromised patients.