COVID-19 Update

These disease problems have been with us for as long as we've been here.

WaPo:

As the novel coronavirus pandemic reshapes lives and entire economies, historians tell us this is not the first time. The earliest written records of tiny infectious organisms overhauling human societies stretch back as far as the Plague of Justinian in A.D. 541, which is thought to have killed up to 50 million people, or even the earlier Antonine Plague in A.D. 165, which left 5 million dead, a substantial portion of the world then.

Now, paleogenomics — a nascent field that studies DNA in remnants of ancient teeth — is rewriting the first chapter of humanity’s entanglement with disease to thousands of years older than originally thought. The growing evidence suggests that these first epidemics forced societies to make epoch-defining transformations.

“In the case of covid-19 [the disease caused by the coronavirus], we see similar processes, but we are watching it unfold in real time,” said Anne Stone, regents professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, whose focus is anthropological genetics. She also has studied evidence of tuberculosis in ancient DNA.

Paleogenomics, which adapts high-end medical tools similar to some now being used to track the coronavirus, has amounted to a “revolution” in understanding disease history, says Maria Spyrou, a microbiologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

“This is one of the things that we can now start saying,” said Spyrou, adding that where historical records are lacking, DNA evidence offers the possibility of filling in gaps, sometimes in surprising ways.

“One of them is plague,” Spyrou said. “Until 2015, we thought that plague was maybe a 3,000-year-old disease.”

Scientists and archaeologists now believe, however, that the plague bacteria, which caused the medieval Black Death that killed up to half of Europe’s population, infected humans roughly 5,000 years ago in the Stone Age. The bacteria, after it had entered the bloodstream and likely killed the host, circulated into the pulp chamber of teeth, which kept its DNA insulated from millennia of environmental wear and tear. In the past decade, scientists have been able to extract and analyze that DNA.
So we know about things like how a contagion spreads, and we still have a buncha fuckin' dip sticks telling us we should send all the kids back to school.

Anybody who's had school-aged kids knows there's a connection between sending your kids to school in the fall and the whole family catching cold by Halloween. And then sending them to camp or summer day care, and everybody catching cold again by 4th of July.

Everybody knows this. EVERY-fucking-body.

30 years ago, a paleontologist named Bob Bakker put up the hypothesis that some mass extinctions probably had a lot to do with migration. As continents shifted, and sea levels fell to expose land bridges, etc, the great herds could move into different places - their isolation from one another fell away. As they roamed around and co-mingled, they came into contact with critters that carried diseases very different from anything they'd become immune to. They have no defense against these new pathogens, and if the new bugs were bad enough, they all fucking died.

We've been migrating and co-mingling a lot lately - a lot more than ever before - and here we are.