I can find no news outlet reporting the fact claimed in the headline, that the person died less than 24 hours after showing symptoms.
What is reported, in this article and many others, is that the person arrived at the hospital and died there the same day. There is no mention in any article I have read that the symptoms began less than 24 hours before the death.
> The victim was rushed to Flagstaff Medical Center, showing severe symptoms, and died the same day.
But sure, that doesn't rule out that the symptoms became severere, or that there weren't different lesser symptoms beforehand. It does make it sound like it was all pretty immediate though.
That they were rushed to the medical center and died the same day doesn't tell us much.
They could have been ill at home for several days or weeks until someone decided to call for help; then when first responders arrived, they saw it was serious and rushed the patient to the medical center.
The local reporting just said the patient died the same day they sought care, without saying anything about when the illness may have started.
I recall being on a road trip and was at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains; was getting ready to camp at a random camp site and noticed a sign warning or squirrels that carry bubonic plague via fleas…
Scary..
It’s not usually very bad. My wife used to do epidemiology in Utah, and the four corner states have a few plague cases every year. Very easy to get from prairie dogs as well. Iirc, prairie dog colonies are separated based on which ones have the plague and which don’t.
I wonder also, although I kind of doubt it. As predators, they maintain relatively low population densities and are typically the first to go extinct when things get weird.
Selection would favor pathogens that instead specialize for hosts that are hard to get rid of. Mice, cockroaches, prairie dogs...
When you say it's easy to get from prairie dogs, how exactly does that happen? Is it like, you're camping, and a prairie dog gets into your tent? How exactly does that people get exposed to a prairie dog?
An article I read previously on HN strongly emphasized that rats may not have been the vector for the plague. I don't know what to believe on the internet anymore
The Black Death occurred when European medicine (at least for diseases) was still rudimentary. Plague doctors had pleasant-smelling herbs in their masks because that seemed like a reasonable defense against the disease. Leaches and bloodletting were common treatments ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism ). Later, there was something of a legend regarding Four Thieves Vinegar ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_thieves_vinegar ).
But they did eventually connect plague outbreaks to rats, and killed the rats in the name of public health.
Today we have very effective antibiotics, better knowledge of the body to offer supportive care, and even knowledge about how the plague is transmitted so we can have more effective public health actions.
What debacle? That masks only reduced transmission by about 30% and not 100% and a large statistically illiterate portion of society didn't understand that 30% reduction is better than 0% reduction?
The debacle of failing to convey the concrete reality of aerosol transmission and failing to convey the concrete reality of masks that gape at the sides (“surgical masks”) fundamentally and obviously not protecting against aerosol transmission while masks that don’t gape at the sides (N95/FFP2) fundamentally and obviously and provably do protect against aerosol transmission.
The thing with the masks is exactly the same as if public shopping efficiency authorities had consistently put out the large-scale message that “bags” work to carry groceries but conflating mesh bags with non-perforated bags; Yes, mesh bags do tend to get upwards of 30% of the objects you purchase to your home. There’s an underlying insult to common sense and people are actually not stupid.
I guess they linked germs to bad smells (e.g. miasma) and figured out good smells might counter them. It's a pity they hadn't invented essential oils at the time.
I am currently watching a TV show about a 21st century Japanese doctor who is sent back in time to 19th century Edo and it is fascinating how the answer to so many diseases is basically "penicillin".
How the hell humanity managed to last so long without antibiotics is mindboggling.
(I am making popcorn, in preparation for the inevitable administration schism and late night TweetRants between the "ban masks at all costs because what about her emails" and "profiteer from selling plague masks to the CDC under contracts bought with campaign donations" factions. I predict red plague masks with MAGA logos.)
I think the plague has not been an issue since it is very sensitive against penicillin. What is concerning is more the speed from diagnosis to death in this case.
I have read that southern Europeans often have a much harsher response to illness (higher fever / skin going bright red / that kind of thing), and that this is speculated to be a leftover from the Black Plague.
I can't find a reference to it now, though, and if there was a term for the exaggerated response I don't remember it.
It's possible that my memory confused a harsher fever response to normal illnesses with familial mediterranean fever:
Nasty thing that. Bubonic plague became famous for killing nearly half the western world in the 14th century in just a few years, but for all its voracious destructiveness, the pneumonic variant left it in the dust in specific situations. I've read that in cities and towns where plague took on its pneumonic form instead of its bubonic variant, 80%+ of the local population would die in just days. In some cities struck by this, populations didn't recover until the 18th century.
I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale.
The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average social group, family or community, one would hear of only a very small minority of people having actually died. It was, comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of pure clinical impact.
Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so many years now completely erased from your personal world. All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
This reinforces my belief that today is the best time in human history to live. Yes there is still pain and suffering but overall more humans live lives our ancestors could not begin to imagine.
>Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.
I'm pretty sure that abysmal health options, food insecurity to the point of famine always being just a stone's throw or single bad season away, and grinding poverty all created plenty of stress. The vast majority of people at the time just had no IG Reels with which to vent about their crisis mode for posterity. I just can't imagine any random modern person's level of stress being somehow worse.
As for lack of direction. Life in those times for a vast majority had a simple direction: labor and toil intensely until you die of old age/disease in the same place you were born, rarely straying more than a few miles from those horizons. I'd call today's self-created "lack of direction" pretty preferable to that.
I've read stress is probably much worse today because of the speed at which we experience stressful events. Sure famine and illness were a concern, and we still have to stress and concern ourselves about resource accumulation and illness today. But we also have a great deal of additional stress that didn't really exist at that time and much of it is stress that we have to simply put away to deal with other things so that we don't fall victim to MORE stressful situations. Just the fact that everytime you pass a car in opposing traffic you are about 5 feet away from having a total stranger kill you is a wildly stressful event that we mostly just abstract away and internalize in order to get where we are going at around 100ft per second. We also have the mental overhead of knowing that any sort of stressful event that happens we will become immediately aware of it.
It used to be a thing that people would have nervous breakdowns (panic attack) before checking the mail if they were worried about some impending news. Such as a son at war or a sick relative etc. Now we are simply in that state at pretty much any given time.
And we know this. We can measure it and reason about it. But good times breeds weak people and we’re well into the phase of people no-longer grokking why vaccines, civil government, democracy, floodplain management, etc. need to exist.
This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
Maybe arguing over different interpretations of it, but I think it's obviously true. Once you become separated by too many generations from the first-person experience of a world war, a famine, now-preventable childhood illnesses and deaths, fascism, etc. it becomes impossible to truly grok the fully weight and critical importance of why we take these menaces so seriously. And some of these things have happened more recently to some, and you don't see people from those regions being as confused as Americans, for example, for why you don't embrace fascism, or Russia, or anti vaccinations, etc.
When a population spends a generations enjoying a world without all these diseases, they lose the social herd immunity to the intellectual stupidity that's proliferating today, now helped along by increasingly prominent figures, including one government health department head [1][2][3].
And yet the second World War, the most destructive war in history, and fascism and nazism themselves, occurred within a generation of the end of the first World War, the most destructive war in their history.
Throughout history, war has always begotten more war. Look at the Middle East today: by your logic, it should be the most peaceful place on Earth by now, given how all of the people born there for the last 50 years had been through war (and often famine etc). And yet many of them are actively seeking more war to right the wrongs of the war before, or just because they see their neighbors are weak and it's a good chance to invade them and "rebuild our historic lands".
Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always thrived.
Same goes for preventative maintenance, handling technical debt or any action that keeps negative consequences at bay. It's a failure mode that's almost an inverse of loss-aversion; some people will start asking "Why are we investing in $ACTION, it seems unnecessary as nothing bad ever happens"
"The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. "
Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.
In the middle ages they understood quarantine, but the fact that the disease was carried by fleas made it worse: It'd break containment unless the arrival was by boat, and you didn't let anyone disembark.
So even when warned (and people were warned) often the people bringing the warnings could spread the disease anyway.
> Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth.
My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
I can imagine, though in the context you describe, the entire terrifying process would have been much slower-moving. Months maybe? I'm honestly curious.
My partner's internship was in a hospital, so by the time he saw people they were mostly already acutely ill, so in many cases the decline was pretty quick (though obviously much longer than something like plague).
I was more referring to the intense fear and constant undercurrent of death that permeated urban communities of young gay men at the time. As it did mostly affect young men, these were folks who were otherwise in the prime of their lives physically, and then when they got sick the physical wasting in the end was often pretty extreme. And it was made all the more difficult by the fact that society just kinda went on as normal (or worse, argued that AIDS was "killing all the right people").
> I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale
The Black Death was so big that people struggled to comprehend it at the time, too.
Exactly that too. Coupled with them living in almost complete darkness about how or why diseases spread, it would have been exceptionally terrifying to behold in a way that a modern person in the middle of a pandemic wouldn't have to face in quite the same way.
What?! I know hundreds of people who have had it, and only one I know went to the hospital. Zero died. I’ve had it three times. Zero hospital visits. One was “bad cold”; one was “mild cold”; the last was “would have never known I had anything if not for a complete loss of smell, which made me test”.
Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
I know a couple in Missouri who lost 5 family members between his and her side. All obese. I believe 4 of them died after the vaccine was available, but they refused to take it.
The COVID-19 pandemic sharply exacerbated the rise in US deaths in 2020 and 2021, more so than in other countries, and with long-lasting consequences that continue to be realized. But the persistent disparity in US mortality in comparison to its peers is largely driven by crises that began long before the pandemic.
I'm sorry but you're way off base, or deliberately reacting to information that you perceive as having a political agenda that it actually doesn't have.
How I value my friends has nothing to do with the death toll and mortality rate I saw anecdotally, of nearly nobody I know dying from it out of hundreds of people of many ages that I knew at the time. Do you imagine that me valuing my friendships more or less somehow changes the clinical mortality stats for a carefully monitored virus? Really?
Also, COVID wasn't a light cold, but for many people, the vast majority in fact, its symptoms were moderate to mild and far from fatal. Again, this isn't politics of any kind talking, it's just the raw numbers from any reliable source you care to look at. IFR wasn't anywhere close to 10% by the way, as you say further down. Most people, by far, with COVID, were never hospitalized for it (that would have been impossible considering what percentage of the population eventually got it) and the IFR rate among them wasn't 10%. I'd truly love to see your source for that whopper.
Globally, in absolute averaged total, as far as any source I've seen indicates, COVID had/has an IFR that roughly breaks down as follows: This is from the National Institute of Health btw.
"For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups."
In any case, all of this deviates slightly from a more basic point there's simply no comparison between COVID and the Black Death, in no scenario or circumstance, and mentioning that is not denying that COVID could be dangerous. It's just a statement of obvious facts about how much, much more horrific one of those two pandemics was historically.
Indeed. I wrongly assumed it would be bubonic as it seems to be the most common form (and because it qualifies a bit the term "plague" which can be perceived as generic, I think).
"Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected rodents. "
Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me fleas
Many years ago, I knew a family who named the three squirrels who regularly visited their back yard "Bubonic", "Pneumonic", and "Septicemic". The squirrels did not respond to these names, but the family sure did find it amusing to use them.
I was let down by the link to "plague" in the lede being internal. I don't know what I expected, because that's the norm.
At the very least, what I'd like to see from news sites is using a LLM to synthesize the most recent/relevant stories to generate some sort of blurb explaining the topic for a given page.
That is, if a human can't be bothered to do it themselves.
According to the article, they're all the same plague, but it manifests differently based on which organs it hits.
Apparently there's a couple of cases every year, but I've got to say that amidst the return of measles and various other diseases, the cuts in healthcare, this is not a great look.
I think the statistical anomaly you point out is an incredibly worthwhile thing to explore. There’s something to understand there. But I’m not sure it directly supports or refutes any arguments about domestic policies, other than perhaps saying that domestic policy making does not have a 100% guaranteed desired effect.
There’s likely numerous other variables to explore.
No, I’m agreeing that it’s not about domestic policies. That’s my point. OP tried to bring domestic cuts to Medicaid into the issue to make it sound like the measles cases in the U.S. have something to do with that domestic policy.
That's a misrepresentation. I did not claim that the cuts to medicaid caused the rise in measles; that would have been a silly claim, considering those cuts are being made right now, whereas the rise in measles is already ongoing.
I'm saying it's part of a pattern. The rise in measles, after it was practically eliminated, is obviously caused by the rise in anti-vax beliefs. And that plus the other factors I mentioned are part of a pattern of carelessness and misinformation around public health. All of it put together, these are extremely worrisome developments.
I can find no news outlet reporting the fact claimed in the headline, that the person died less than 24 hours after showing symptoms.
What is reported, in this article and many others, is that the person arrived at the hospital and died there the same day. There is no mention in any article I have read that the symptoms began less than 24 hours before the death.
This article kind of implies it:
> The victim was rushed to Flagstaff Medical Center, showing severe symptoms, and died the same day.
But sure, that doesn't rule out that the symptoms became severere, or that there weren't different lesser symptoms beforehand. It does make it sound like it was all pretty immediate though.
That they were rushed to the medical center and died the same day doesn't tell us much.
They could have been ill at home for several days or weeks until someone decided to call for help; then when first responders arrived, they saw it was serious and rushed the patient to the medical center.
The local reporting just said the patient died the same day they sought care, without saying anything about when the illness may have started.
I.e. "after showing symptoms" and "after showing symptoms to staff, having finally checked in to a medical center" are completely different.
I recall being on a road trip and was at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains; was getting ready to camp at a random camp site and noticed a sign warning or squirrels that carry bubonic plague via fleas… Scary..
It’s not usually very bad. My wife used to do epidemiology in Utah, and the four corner states have a few plague cases every year. Very easy to get from prairie dogs as well. Iirc, prairie dog colonies are separated based on which ones have the plague and which don’t.
> Iirc, prairie dog colonies are separated based on which ones have the plague and which don’t.
Do you mean 'naturally' by their own selection, or some external means?
I read it as someone keeps track of it for public safety
This is what I meant
I’m guess doge cut took that away…
It's done at state level, by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources for one, so it is possible that federal government damage has not affected it.
I hope that the black footed ferret reintroduction efforts are successful (https://www.fws.gov/project/black-footed-ferret-recovery). There would be a lot less plague out there if so.
Lime disease has a similar relationship with predators that eat mice, so let's also keep an eye out for the owls and snakes.
Wonder if the same fleas that affect prarie dogs will also be at home on them?
I wonder also, although I kind of doubt it. As predators, they maintain relatively low population densities and are typically the first to go extinct when things get weird.
Selection would favor pathogens that instead specialize for hosts that are hard to get rid of. Mice, cockroaches, prairie dogs...
How would reintroducing the black footed ferret reduce the plague ? It's not stated in that link.
Reducing prairie dog concentrations, and most often killing the weaker slower ones, which are likely infected and showing the most symptoms.
Reduces spread and increases evolutionary pressure to increase resistance and possibly even become immune.
Possibly by reducing prairie dog numbers and concentration
BFFs eat prairie dogs.
They reduce the density of prairie dogs.
When you say it's easy to get from prairie dogs, how exactly does that happen? Is it like, you're camping, and a prairie dog gets into your tent? How exactly does that people get exposed to a prairie dog?
It's not the prairie dogs themselves, but the fleas on the dogs. The carriers for the plague are fleas.
Yes, but every case I've heard of involved direct contact with the prairie dog. I can't imagine the fleas are that mobile without them.
It’s pretty easy to get close to prairie dogs over time. They will eventually learn you’re not a threat, and tell the others.
So you’re going on a walk one day, they seem friendly, people like handling cute animals… bada big bada boom
It's usually people whose job (or I guess hobby) involves managing prairie dogs. It's not usually ordinary civilians.
I knew someone (in the U.S.) who contracted the plague along with his wife. He survived but his wife did not.
According to him, about one person dies each year from it.
How did they get exposed?
Fleas moving from rats to pets I presume.
An article I read previously on HN strongly emphasized that rats may not have been the vector for the plague. I don't know what to believe on the internet anymore
This article suggests prairie dogs and other rodents.
What improvements do we have to survive against the plague compared to in the past? I'm curious to understand the difference
The Black Death occurred when European medicine (at least for diseases) was still rudimentary. Plague doctors had pleasant-smelling herbs in their masks because that seemed like a reasonable defense against the disease. Leaches and bloodletting were common treatments ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism ). Later, there was something of a legend regarding Four Thieves Vinegar ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_thieves_vinegar ).
But they did eventually connect plague outbreaks to rats, and killed the rats in the name of public health.
Today we have very effective antibiotics, better knowledge of the body to offer supportive care, and even knowledge about how the plague is transmitted so we can have more effective public health actions.
> Plague doctors had pleasant-smelling herbs in their masks because that seemed like a reasonable defense against the disease.
The implied condescension hits hard after the Covid masking debacle.
What debacle? That masks only reduced transmission by about 30% and not 100% and a large statistically illiterate portion of society didn't understand that 30% reduction is better than 0% reduction?
The debacle of failing to convey the concrete reality of aerosol transmission and failing to convey the concrete reality of masks that gape at the sides (“surgical masks”) fundamentally and obviously not protecting against aerosol transmission while masks that don’t gape at the sides (N95/FFP2) fundamentally and obviously and provably do protect against aerosol transmission.
The thing with the masks is exactly the same as if public shopping efficiency authorities had consistently put out the large-scale message that “bags” work to carry groceries but conflating mesh bags with non-perforated bags; Yes, mesh bags do tend to get upwards of 30% of the objects you purchase to your home. There’s an underlying insult to common sense and people are actually not stupid.
I guess they linked germs to bad smells (e.g. miasma) and figured out good smells might counter them. It's a pity they hadn't invented essential oils at the time.
At least that makes some logical sense.
Covidian sympathetic magic (wear a strip of cloth over your mouth but not your nose to appease the germ gods) doesn't.
Antibiotics. Yersenia pestis is a bacteria that can be killed by most antibiotics
I am currently watching a TV show about a 21st century Japanese doctor who is sent back in time to 19th century Edo and it is fascinating how the answer to so many diseases is basically "penicillin".
How the hell humanity managed to last so long without antibiotics is mindboggling.
And we have better Plague Masks these days.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/plague-do...
(I am making popcorn, in preparation for the inevitable administration schism and late night TweetRants between the "ban masks at all costs because what about her emails" and "profiteer from selling plague masks to the CDC under contracts bought with campaign donations" factions. I predict red plague masks with MAGA logos.)
I think the plague has not been an issue since it is very sensitive against penicillin. What is concerning is more the speed from diagnosis to death in this case.
Sadly, it could be as simple as the guy didn’t run up tens of thousands of dollars of healthcare, and left it too late to get treatment.
Not that complicated- germ theory and sanitation. The best way to survive an illness is to avoid getting it in the first place.
I have read that southern Europeans often have a much harsher response to illness (higher fever / skin going bright red / that kind of thing), and that this is speculated to be a leftover from the Black Plague.
I can't find a reference to it now, though, and if there was a term for the exaggerated response I don't remember it.
It's possible that my memory confused a harsher fever response to normal illnesses with familial mediterranean fever:
https://www.genome.gov/news/news-release/genomic-variation-c...
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-bla...
Which plague?
Not stated in the article, but it's pneumonic plague, according to this story from azcentral and this story from CNN: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/20... https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/12/health/plague-death-arizona
> Plague is a bacterial infection known for killing tens of millions in 14th century Europe. Today, it’s easily treated with antibiotics.
> The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats.
Nasty thing that. Bubonic plague became famous for killing nearly half the western world in the 14th century in just a few years, but for all its voracious destructiveness, the pneumonic variant left it in the dust in specific situations. I've read that in cities and towns where plague took on its pneumonic form instead of its bubonic variant, 80%+ of the local population would die in just days. In some cities struck by this, populations didn't recover until the 18th century.
I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale.
The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average social group, family or community, one would hear of only a very small minority of people having actually died. It was, comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of pure clinical impact.
Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so many years now completely erased from your personal world. All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
This reinforces my belief that today is the best time in human history to live. Yes there is still pain and suffering but overall more humans live lives our ancestors could not begin to imagine.
In some ways - particularly health and food security - definitely.
Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.
>Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.
I'm pretty sure that abysmal health options, food insecurity to the point of famine always being just a stone's throw or single bad season away, and grinding poverty all created plenty of stress. The vast majority of people at the time just had no IG Reels with which to vent about their crisis mode for posterity. I just can't imagine any random modern person's level of stress being somehow worse.
As for lack of direction. Life in those times for a vast majority had a simple direction: labor and toil intensely until you die of old age/disease in the same place you were born, rarely straying more than a few miles from those horizons. I'd call today's self-created "lack of direction" pretty preferable to that.
I've read stress is probably much worse today because of the speed at which we experience stressful events. Sure famine and illness were a concern, and we still have to stress and concern ourselves about resource accumulation and illness today. But we also have a great deal of additional stress that didn't really exist at that time and much of it is stress that we have to simply put away to deal with other things so that we don't fall victim to MORE stressful situations. Just the fact that everytime you pass a car in opposing traffic you are about 5 feet away from having a total stranger kill you is a wildly stressful event that we mostly just abstract away and internalize in order to get where we are going at around 100ft per second. We also have the mental overhead of knowing that any sort of stressful event that happens we will become immediately aware of it.
It used to be a thing that people would have nervous breakdowns (panic attack) before checking the mail if they were worried about some impending news. Such as a son at war or a sick relative etc. Now we are simply in that state at pretty much any given time.
They aren’t.
how do you know?
And yet Americans have never been angrier.
Tom Nichols has a theory that people are actually just kind of bored.
Most of the men involved in this were pretty well off, for instance. Big trucks, nice houses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
Hardly oppressed people.
Social media algorithms tend to stir things a bit.
social media is people
I swear if the Boston Tea Party happened today it would be blamed on misinformation on social media
Social media is algorithms amplifying divisive content to increase engagement.
Eh, people got pretty worked up in the ‘70’s. And WW2. And the Cold War. And WW1.
Eventhoug JFK Jr
And we know this. We can measure it and reason about it. But good times breeds weak people and we’re well into the phase of people no-longer grokking why vaccines, civil government, democracy, floodplain management, etc. need to exist.
This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
> good times breeds weak people
This is a silly and regularly disproven trope.
For an extensive and approachable start: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
Maybe arguing over different interpretations of it, but I think it's obviously true. Once you become separated by too many generations from the first-person experience of a world war, a famine, now-preventable childhood illnesses and deaths, fascism, etc. it becomes impossible to truly grok the fully weight and critical importance of why we take these menaces so seriously. And some of these things have happened more recently to some, and you don't see people from those regions being as confused as Americans, for example, for why you don't embrace fascism, or Russia, or anti vaccinations, etc.
When a population spends a generations enjoying a world without all these diseases, they lose the social herd immunity to the intellectual stupidity that's proliferating today, now helped along by increasingly prominent figures, including one government health department head [1][2][3].
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/08/nx...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-health-secr...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
And yet the second World War, the most destructive war in history, and fascism and nazism themselves, occurred within a generation of the end of the first World War, the most destructive war in their history.
Throughout history, war has always begotten more war. Look at the Middle East today: by your logic, it should be the most peaceful place on Earth by now, given how all of the people born there for the last 50 years had been through war (and often famine etc). And yet many of them are actively seeking more war to right the wrongs of the war before, or just because they see their neighbors are weak and it's a good chance to invade them and "rebuild our historic lands".
Beat me to the punch. That simplistic piece of fantasized trope needs to die as soon as possible.
> But good times breeds weak people
Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always thrived.
Same goes for preventative maintenance, handling technical debt or any action that keeps negative consequences at bay. It's a failure mode that's almost an inverse of loss-aversion; some people will start asking "Why are we investing in $ACTION, it seems unnecessary as nothing bad ever happens"
People don't understand why Chesterton's fence exists
You can’t fight it, you just endure, and one day you may die but hopefully others will carry on in a better world.
You should write a book, if you haven't yet. I'd buy it. Love the way you convey emotion with words.
Try Michael Crichtons "The hot zone".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone
There's entire chapters of this:
"The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. "
Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.
Richard Preston, not Crichton.
Maybe you’re thinking of The Andromeda Strain?
The Hot Zone was an awesome read. Highly recommended.
Now that was a wonderful compliment. Thank you.
Recommendation: The Doomsday Book. Connie Willis. Heartbreaking.
In the middle ages they understood quarantine, but the fact that the disease was carried by fleas made it worse: It'd break containment unless the arrival was by boat, and you didn't let anyone disembark.
So even when warned (and people were warned) often the people bringing the warnings could spread the disease anyway.
> Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth.
My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
I can imagine, though in the context you describe, the entire terrifying process would have been much slower-moving. Months maybe? I'm honestly curious.
My partner's internship was in a hospital, so by the time he saw people they were mostly already acutely ill, so in many cases the decline was pretty quick (though obviously much longer than something like plague).
I was more referring to the intense fear and constant undercurrent of death that permeated urban communities of young gay men at the time. As it did mostly affect young men, these were folks who were otherwise in the prime of their lives physically, and then when they got sick the physical wasting in the end was often pretty extreme. And it was made all the more difficult by the fact that society just kinda went on as normal (or worse, argued that AIDS was "killing all the right people").
> I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale
The Black Death was so big that people struggled to comprehend it at the time, too.
Exactly that too. Coupled with them living in almost complete darkness about how or why diseases spread, it would have been exceptionally terrifying to behold in a way that a modern person in the middle of a pandemic wouldn't have to face in quite the same way.
Everyone I know lost someone to COVID. I almost croaked twice to it.
Idk where that "small minority" is but it sounds like you might not value your friends very highly.
Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold.
The IFR (infection fatality rate: the chance of dying for an individual who contracted COVID) is under 1%.
That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.
One could argue that the plague also has a low kill rate these days.
The IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.
What?! I know hundreds of people who have had it, and only one I know went to the hospital. Zero died. I’ve had it three times. Zero hospital visits. One was “bad cold”; one was “mild cold”; the last was “would have never known I had anything if not for a complete loss of smell, which made me test”.
Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
Who said everyone? iirc untreated IFR is around 10%
You did: “IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.”
Eh, ESL. I meant the ones who need it, obviously.
"Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold."
All of my friends, extended family and friends of friends got Covid. Nobody died. The only people that died had pre-existing conditions.
To the vast majority of the population, it was similar to a bad cold.
I know a couple in Missouri who lost 5 family members between his and her side. All obese. I believe 4 of them died after the vaccine was available, but they refused to take it.
Compared to the plague? Absolutely, it definitely was. As a society it’s a sign of how far we’ve come that we have eliminated that kind of illness.
I mean I know dozens of people who caught it and nobody died. Anecdotes don’t mean much.
Everyone caught it by now, so you know more than that.
Doesn't mean it wasn't deadly during the initial wave.
The national death rate went up in 2020 & 21, a mix of died with covid, died due to covid delaying medical procedures minus less road accidents.
From US Excess Deaths Continued to Rise Even After the COVID-19 Pandemic | SPH https://share.google/RSjwObWdN7bwwJ5od
The COVID-19 pandemic sharply exacerbated the rise in US deaths in 2020 and 2021, more so than in other countries, and with long-lasting consequences that continue to be realized. But the persistent disparity in US mortality in comparison to its peers is largely driven by crises that began long before the pandemic.
I'm sorry but you're way off base, or deliberately reacting to information that you perceive as having a political agenda that it actually doesn't have.
How I value my friends has nothing to do with the death toll and mortality rate I saw anecdotally, of nearly nobody I know dying from it out of hundreds of people of many ages that I knew at the time. Do you imagine that me valuing my friendships more or less somehow changes the clinical mortality stats for a carefully monitored virus? Really?
Also, COVID wasn't a light cold, but for many people, the vast majority in fact, its symptoms were moderate to mild and far from fatal. Again, this isn't politics of any kind talking, it's just the raw numbers from any reliable source you care to look at. IFR wasn't anywhere close to 10% by the way, as you say further down. Most people, by far, with COVID, were never hospitalized for it (that would have been impossible considering what percentage of the population eventually got it) and the IFR rate among them wasn't 10%. I'd truly love to see your source for that whopper.
Globally, in absolute averaged total, as far as any source I've seen indicates, COVID had/has an IFR that roughly breaks down as follows: This is from the National Institute of Health btw.
"For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups."
In any case, all of this deviates slightly from a more basic point there's simply no comparison between COVID and the Black Death, in no scenario or circumstance, and mentioning that is not denying that COVID could be dangerous. It's just a statement of obvious facts about how much, much more horrific one of those two pandemics was historically.
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Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague.
You do know that both pneumonic and bubonic are caused by the same bacterium, right? They’re just different transmission methods.
Indeed. I wrongly assumed it would be bubonic as it seems to be the most common form (and because it qualifies a bit the term "plague" which can be perceived as generic, I think).
Yes, many types of bacteria can cause ‘a plague’, but at least in the western world, only one was ‘The Plague’.
Probably anyway, there is some debate on that. But it’s pretty likely.
You left one variant off, apparently:
"Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected rodents. "
Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me fleas
Many years ago, I knew a family who named the three squirrels who regularly visited their back yard "Bubonic", "Pneumonic", and "Septicemic". The squirrels did not respond to these names, but the family sure did find it amusing to use them.
Mnemonic Plague
People
Learn
About
Germs
Using
Epidemiology
What a wonderful typo. Death by infected memories.
This is a solid short story prompt.
Cue the Fall Out Boy track...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onzL0EM1pKY
You might enjoy the movie Pontypool. I describe it as a zombie movie about linguistics.
I genuinely don't understand why this comment is downvoted.
I was let down by the link to "plague" in the lede being internal. I don't know what I expected, because that's the norm.
At the very least, what I'd like to see from news sites is using a LLM to synthesize the most recent/relevant stories to generate some sort of blurb explaining the topic for a given page.
That is, if a human can't be bothered to do it themselves.
Bubonic
According to the article, they're all the same plague, but it manifests differently based on which organs it hits.
Apparently there's a couple of cases every year, but I've got to say that amidst the return of measles and various other diseases, the cuts in healthcare, this is not a great look.
Apparently it’s very easy to treat, if you can and do seek treatment. Which is why the annual deaths are usually rural regions.
From the article:
>Symptoms often begin within a week of infection and may include fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes, nausea and weakness.
If I had symptoms like that I think I'd just stay at home and not visit a doctor yet. Certainly not within 24 hours of them showing up.
Mumps, a common kid's viral disease, has overlapping symptoms, so many people might follow a "let's wait and see" approach.
Also, medical practitioners may not immediately put on their bioharzard protection suite when someone walks in with swollen lymph nodes and nausea.
That's why it is important to take news of incidents and location of the occurrence into consideration, both as a patient and as medical staff.
Mumps is commonly vaccinated against when children are very young. It’s one of the Ms in the MMR vaccine.
It’s 2025 my guy. Can’t count on kids getting vaccinated anymore.
Depends where you are. I guess the U.S. has an outsized representation online but it’s less than 5% of the world.
Up here kids are not permitted to go to school without it. There’s some exceptions but they’re, in practice, very difficult to secure.
The vast majority are. Most parents are not idiots.
That may not be true. Most people are idiots, and most parents are people.
https://ruralhospitals.chqpr.org/Map.html
As of July 2025, the U.S. had about 1,300 measles cases compared to over 2,700 in Canada as of May 2025: https://vaxopedia.org/2025/06/02/the-north-american-measles-.... See also: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-measles-cases-hit-highest-n...
Canada obviously had only 1/10th the population. Your attempted connection to domestic policies is spurious.
I think the statistical anomaly you point out is an incredibly worthwhile thing to explore. There’s something to understand there. But I’m not sure it directly supports or refutes any arguments about domestic policies, other than perhaps saying that domestic policy making does not have a 100% guaranteed desired effect.
There’s likely numerous other variables to explore.
No, I’m agreeing that it’s not about domestic policies. That’s my point. OP tried to bring domestic cuts to Medicaid into the issue to make it sound like the measles cases in the U.S. have something to do with that domestic policy.
That's a misrepresentation. I did not claim that the cuts to medicaid caused the rise in measles; that would have been a silly claim, considering those cuts are being made right now, whereas the rise in measles is already ongoing.
I'm saying it's part of a pattern. The rise in measles, after it was practically eliminated, is obviously caused by the rise in anti-vax beliefs. And that plus the other factors I mentioned are part of a pattern of carelessness and misinformation around public health. All of it put together, these are extremely worrisome developments.
> I'm saying it's part of a pattern
Is there a rise of anti-vax beliefs in Mexico?
There's a vaccine, but it's old and not recommended for the general population.[1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00041848.htm
There is also a cure if you catch it quick. It’s a pretty good cure - TFA says it has a survival rate of 90% with treatment.
Sounds like a great medicine to take, but a 10% death rate even when treated is pretty scary.
Absolutely - be sure to stay well away from wildlife and enjoy at a distance.
In general, how do you get exposed to it? Hiking? Do people often get that close to prairie dogs? Hiking in Utah?
Fleas bite you in your sleep
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So it begins.