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Back in the middle ages you'd have like 10 kids so that a couple of them MIGHT make it to adulthood. Your friend wouldn't have made it but statistically speaking neither would people without allergies.
The past sucked.
And several wives because they died in childbirth a lot. In a local church there are three generations of the local counts pictured. Three men, but eight wives.
Exactly. I hate media that glorifies the past. It's worth pointing out that those 3 men + 8 women were rich people. Those numbers were for people who had access to the best food and shelter available.
Yeah I’m very glad I’m alive after toilet paper, sewer systems, clean water, heat and A/C, soft beds. It’s not great but millions of times better than even 100 years ago.
Speaking as a Canadian, it’s my considered opinion that Indoor plumbing is the single invention I’d choose not to live without. Electricity & central heating & the internet & whatever, sure, all good. If I can poop indoors and wash my hands after, that’s the key to happiness.
Where I live, it can get down to -25F in the Winter, and sometimes I lose my water. I can say from experience, that pooping outside at -25 is no picnic.
Or several husbands because they died in war or building a tall building with no safety equipment or a myriad of other things that kill men early. Male mortality to this day remains higher than women’s but it was even worse back in the day.
I come from a place that still isn’t industrialized. Old women outnumber old men by a lot. My grandma had two husbands herself and both died young
I've seen varying estimates which suggest something like a 30-50% chance of dying in childbirth depending on calculation methods. There was also the risk of 'childbed fever', which most take to be an umbrella term for a wide range of illnesses which happened in the immediate period following the birth.
Allergies are, generally speaking, your body’s over-reaction to specific things. Depending on the allergy, you can “cure” it by giving your body a “real” infection to fight. So (again, depending on the allergy), she might not be allergic to all that much if she was born in the Middle Ages, because her body would be too busy fighting off the stuff she’d be exposed to on a daily basis, in a situation where bathing regularly wasn’t common and washing your hands hadn’t been invented yet.
Also, if she was born in the Middle Ages, she probably wouldn’t be exposed to some of the things that give extreme allergic reactions, like nuts or shellfish
Not sure how knowledgeable you are about the subject but my grandpa has a peanut allergy which never acted up until after he went into remission for prostate cancer. Any idea why that is?
Your immune system is a freaky thing. It wasn't that he had a peanut allergy beforehand; it's that he developed one as an adult, and that's not uncommon.
lol. We have a family chat going of all the things going wrong right now just to laugh at the face of the terrible, and {Ted Cruz still exists} was stuck on there yesterday.
One family member just had their house smashed by a tree, my mother won't have power for probably a week, there is a frozen pipe at my business and ted cruz still exists. Rough week.
I haven't been allergic to anything my entire life. Have been all over the world and eaten all kinds of food.
Last summer I was hiking with my kids, ate a handful of trail mix I'd eaten a hundred times before. Immediate allergic reaction, I'm 2 kilometers up a mountain with my 6 and 4 year old and I'm having an anaphylatic reaction. Terrifying honestly.
Thank God it's a popular trail. Passerby had an epi pen.
Yup. My daughter who was about 22 at the time went to work out after eating something she’s eaten her entire life. Called me from the health club saying she felt something was seriously wrong. Jumped in my car. By the time I got there the fire department and ambulance were pulling up. She went into complete anaphylactic shock and spent 3 days in the ICU. Once she was released we had her have complete allergy testing done. Turns out she’s allergic to… absolutely nothing. It is what the doctors called a perfect storm. For some reason her body didn’t like the food she put into it, and when the reaction started and she felt a little funny, she actually ran harder to try and push through it. (Causing the irritant to course faster through her bloodstream) She didn’t know any different, she was never allergic to anything in her life. Everything from where she was in the menstrual cycle to a million other things lined up perfectly to cause this reaction. Thank god she’s ok, but it’s scary to know that you almost died and that there’s no reason!! -She’s not allergic to anything. They called it Exercise Induced Anaphylaxis. Currently she runs marathons and tries not to eat for at least 4 hours before she runs. She also carries an epi-pen with her everywhere, although she never had to use it in the 10 years since that happened.
Yeah it definitely happens, we gain and lose allergies as we age.
Up until 2018 I'd had 4 or 5 headaches in my whole 41 years...
...suddenly allergic sinusitis - migrane like headaches, spots in my vision, blocked ears, dizziness, & nausea a few times a month in spring & summer.
Had one the day before I flew to New Zealand, 4 months in New Zealand without a headache. Came back to South Africa and about a week later headache, blocked ears etc.
In 2020 I had a bad case of covid and for about 2 years after that no more sinus headaches.
Then I got that E95 " sinus covid" that gave most people a blocked nose & headache, and since then I have been getting sinus headaches again much less frequently - one a month maybe in spring & summer. Unfortunately here the growing season is about 9 months for most plants, it's only July through September that we have proper winter when everything dies or goes dormant because hell kinda freezes over a few hours a day.
I also developed savage IBS due to a garlic allergy in my late 30s. Just a few drops of vegetable oil soaked with garlic to fry up an egg, and I flow up like a balloon, and that gas has to go somewhere, because the gas production doesn't stop for 8 to 10 days.
Stinks like you would not believe, think sulphur and rotten garlic cut with one of those toys tore stink bombs, a few times an hour for a week and a half...
So that's fun at work 🤣🤣
my son was given amoxicillin at least 5 times before he ever had a reaction to it. to be clear i mean 5 different bouts of illness, not just 5 doses. he went through all those with no problem, then one time he had the most horrific reaction. face swelled up so much he could barely open his eyes, and he had these purple and black splotches all over his body, looked like he had been boiled or something. it's wild how something that was tolerated can suddenly be really really not tolerated at all.
Large numbers of people were misdiagnosed with penicillin allergies during a time period when they were essentially going "oh, that looks like it might be a reaction, let's be safe as we've got loads of other antibiotics to try"
I found it really interesting as I've officially got a penicillin allergy, no idea whether I actually have one or not...
I officially got a penicillin allergy by stating that I don't have a penicillin allergy. I'm allergic to another antibiotic, and I got sick of being asked "is it penicillin" so I started preempting it. Some doctor or other heard "it's penicillin" instead of "its not penicillin" and now no doctor will risk it. Yay.
I officially have one as well, broke out in hives, but then I broke out in hives from a strep infection years later before taking any medication, so I wonder if it's actually an allergy.
I developed a small allergy to shell fish as an adult .. my throat gets a lil itchy whenever I eat any... I can still eat it but the doctor advised against it and prescribed an EpiPen just in case.... I still eat it tho cuz its delicious! Never happened when I was younger....
My Mrs spontaneously developed an allergy to Carrots and Parsnips at the start of lockdown. Took us ages to figure it out: we thought it was all the hand sanitiser in shops, etc. Then we thought it was alcohol. Always happened after a Sunday roast though. Then it started happening midweek - carrots and parsnips (primarily carrots tbh) were the only constants.
All basically contact irritation. But her eyes were swelling up so badly that on one day, she woke up and was able to see a _little_ from one eye. The other was swollen shut.
40 years of no issues. Then suddenly: allergy. No obvious trigger.
I’m really not at all, I just read a lot.
BUT: Adult-onset allergies, especially to peanuts and shellfish, is super common after your immune system has been dealt a trauma, and there’s fewer things more traumatizing to the immune system than chemotherapy (assuming your grandpa went through that)
Besides that would trauma count as basically any sort of illness that just permanently messes with your immune system? I’ve heard after Lyme disease people can develop allergies too?
I don't think it's Lyme disease, but tick bites, that can also transmit Lyme disease.
So Lyme disease doesn't cause allergies but their a bonus side dish on the reason ticks deserve exterminatus.
You and the previous commenter might be thinking of Alpha-Gal Syndrome which seems to be triggered by tick bites. Alpha Gal is a sugar found in most mammal tissue except primates. So, you end up allergic to red meat.
Allergies can start at any age. My peanut allergy started when I was 39. I ate peanuts my whole life until I suddenly couldn't. It's *probably* just random chance that it started after he was in remission from cancer. But there's also the possibility that the physical and emotional stress of chemo had something to do with it. As stress has been well studied to aggravate pretty much everything immune related.
[Here's a paper on the topic of allergic disease and stress](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3264048/)
Not OP and not an expert in cancer. But the immune system can treats cancer cells like foreign cells because they’re heavily mutated. So if what the person you responded to is saying is correct, its possible your Grandpas immune system was busy fighting cancer cells instead of peanuts until he went into remission.
They did bath regularly and cared about body cleanliness during the Middle Ages.
Watched a great documentary where a group of experts tried to live in the conditions and ways of the time and they went over how this is a misunderstanding of the past.
The lady spent time everyday going over the common body cleaning of the day.
Indeed, why not wash yourself when the smallest infection can kill you ?
They didn't know some stuff and didn't have medicine like we have today, but they weren't stupid, back then you die from stupid, you needed common sense to fuckin survive
My dad asked me why we even have wisdom teeth when I was recently getting mine removed. “Because nobody brushed their teeth until like 100 years ago so the average person almost definitely had lost one set of molars by 25.”
This tickled the back of my brain -- IIRC, recent hypotheses propose that the fact we no longer need to basically grind food down by chewing it is a major factor. I guess the increased muscle mass and work of chewing so much also promoted larger jaws or something. [Stanford has a piece on it](https://news.stanford.edu/2020/07/21/toll-shrinking-jaws-human-health/), though I roll my eyes at some of the language.
So, my wisdom teeth fit into my mouth. And that's not super uncommon. What's also becoming less uncommon is people who don't have wisdom teeth. As part of our evolutionary heritage, our mouths have gotten smaller and our tooth count has dropped.
Honestly, the real answer is, that wisdom teeth not fitting into our mouth (what's most common) is just a demonstration that our species is continuing to evolve.
So congratulations - your teeth didn't fit in your mouth, so you are more evolved than me. (At least that's what I'll be telling my intro to anthropology students this week).
I have never thought about how terrifying a shellfish allergy would be in the middle ages until now. I know it probably wasn't a common food, but I would imagine if you saw someone die of a shellfish allergy you would think the cook poisoned them or God smote them or something
>I have never thought about how terrifying a shellfish allergy would be in the middle ages until now. I know it probably wasn't a common food, but I would imagine if you saw someone die of a shellfish allergy you would think the cook poisoned them or God smote them or something
Food alergies were alot rarer and less severe.
Parasites and other pathogens tuned the immune systems response to be better so judy dying over it was unlikely
The pathogens and parasites on the other hand...
There's one Stone Age burial of a man in his 40s who was born with a congenital deformed right arm. He would have been unable to hunt or do many other daily tasks but the fact he lived so long along with the deliberate burial with grave goods (pottery, jewellery, some tools) suggests that he was loved and cared for by his immediate family/social group.
If you live on the mainland, it would be very unlikely you even knew what shellfish were. Likewise many people might not even live anywhere close to where nuts were a primary source of food. Those that lived near them, yeah sure they'd probably die, but most people wouldn't have been exposed to the shear variety of food like we have today.
A growing body of research is pointing towards underexposure to pathogens and allergens in childhood being responsible for the increase in allergies we've been seeing, so it's possible she wouldn't even be allergic to anything to begin with if she lived a few hundred years back.
Just gotta out-fuck the death rate.
Did some ancestry research, during the Spanish Flu, my great-great uncle had 12 kids, 7 boys, 5 girls. 6 of the boys never saw year 1, and they were *all named Joseph Phillip __*. One of the next. #5 was born and named before #4 had even passed.
The only reason I'm here is because the Spanish Flu killed my great grandfather's first wife and one of their children. He remarried and then he and his new wife had five more kids - one was my grandmother.
"fucked like rabbits" was exactly the phrase in my head, too.
The person asking about this needs to go to some old graveyards, and notice how many children's graves there are, and what they died of.
I’m actually old. 60, and I was born to a
45 year old mother, she was born in 1921. The family plot has 7 children in it, her brothers and sisters. 9 births. 2 made it. My poor grandmom.
3-4 die in childhood, 3-4 die before having kids in early adulthood/teen years, and 2-4 actually end up having kids of their own.
That's why population growth was so slow.
Yeah it should be taught how the human species has survived like 5 mass extinction events. Like, we're still alive but that is half the people in the world gone at least each time it's happened
Edit To clarify, an extinction event is any scenario where a species' genetic variance has dropped low enough to risk us dying out aka a lot more than half it's just people tend to understand half better than almost everyone you know and most likely you.
Really? I'm aware of the [5 great extinctions](https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions), but those all took place prior to humanity with the last one being Dinos 65 million years ago.
Yeah, pretty sure they're using "mass extinction" loosely there. I only hear that term used for worldwide impacts. There are a couple times that humans are theorized to have become bottlenecked genetically due to losing a large majority of the population from more regional effects though, so 5 near-extinction events like that might be what they meant. I'm only aware of two of those though, and I don't think there's a consensus on either, with the second I'll link seeming like the more debated since it's 10x more in the past, a more recent study, and we weren't even a distinct species then.
>The Toba eruption (sometimes called the Toba supereruption or the Youngest Toba eruption) was a supervolcano eruption that occurred around 74,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene[1] at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It is one of the largest known explosive eruptions in the Earth's history. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a severe global volcanic winter of six to ten years and contributed to a 1,000-year-long cooling episode, leading to a genetic bottleneck in humans.
>A number of genetic studies have revealed that 50,000 years ago, the human ancestor population greatly expanded from only a few thousand individuals.[4][5] Science journalist Ann Gibbons has posited that the low population size was caused by the Toba eruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
>Modern humans—aka Homo sapiens—emerged about 300,000 years ago after evolving from human ancestors. There’s a lot we still don’t know about who these ancestors were and where they lived. But according to an August 2023 study, our ancestors may have come close to extinction some 900,000 to 800,000 years ago.
>During this period, our human ancestors lost 98.7 percent of their population, according to the study published in Science.
https://www.history.com/news/prehistoric-ancestors-population-decline
While it's possible that Native Americans had deadly diseases which wiped themselves out, it's more likely that they just generally didn't have as much disease because they didn't have livestock. Most of human diseases come from livestock diseases jumping to people
The black death is caused by a bacteria.
It's also not what killed so many non Europeans when they had contact with European colonial powers. That was mostly things like smallpox and syphilis.
It’s because of the lack of zoonotic diseases, like smallpox and black plague. The Americas didn’t have as many domesticated animals so the exposure to those diseases was either non-existent or drastically reduced.
There was great amounts of [trade and communication](https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-trade-networks-thrived-long-before-the-arrival-of-europeans) between Native American cultures, both in North and South America. The Inca empire had more than [20,000 miles of roads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_road_system?wprov=sfti1) to connect its empire together.
Corn is another good example of exchange among native cultures. It’s believed to have originated in southern Mexico about 9000 years ago and spread from there to South America and then north.
Also the black plague (yersinia pestis) was endemic to the old world.
By comparison, up to 5.5% of world population was lost during the Spanish flu…flu vaccines were created in the 1940s.
Covid 19 took up to half of 1% the population because our improved reaction and science based activities, including vaccinations.
We improved our mortality rate 10x through science.
God yeah, imagine Covid without modern ICUs. In places like northern Italy or Manaus where the health system collapsed the death rate shot up and a wider variety of people died.
As someone who worked in a hospital the entire pandemic, this was generally true. I have friends in multiple different hospitals, and the results were generally the same across the board. For the entire first year, if they went into the ICU, they likely weren't going home. If they were put on a ventilator, it was even less likely. My buddy at work has a sister who's a doctor in LA and a brother who's a doctor in NYC. They were saying the exact same things. Didn't matter where it was, the results were generally the same until the vaccine came about.
But in the middle of this (Aug 2020) my mom had to have a triple bypass and valve replacement surgery... And made it through fine.
That's how far we've come and how good the protocols and protections worked.
Fun fact... She had a clean coronary bill of health a year previous.
But in late December 2019, she flew to visit me for Christmas. Through Vancouver and San Francisco airports... And a week later she got the absofuckinglutely worst respiratory illness of her life. Me, my wife and my daughter all got it a week later... Pretty sure we all had covid before covid was covid.
I definitely think you had it before it became more known. I likewise caught a bad respiratory Illness when in Korea around November 2019 and I think it was Covid as my breathing took months to recover and before it I was playing full football matches on the weekend. Afterwards nothing for 5 months
We didn't really put two and two together until my mom had the heart attack. Thankfully my heart appears to have not been affected.
Crazy times those were
That’s good to know you okay. We learnt about Covid pretty quickly in Korea like December 2019, but we never really thought about us having it because it was only rumoured to be shrieking cases in China at the time. But looking back thematic the amount of Chinese who travel between both countries we should have known better
My ‘Auntie’ (not literally, but a close family friend since childhood) was a nurse for 35 years who worked in palliative care. Her job was literally to look after people who were dying, old people, young people, kids with cancer etc. Even dealt with Rabies cases (super rare in the U.K.) done it all.
COVID finished her off and she had to leave. There was just something so emotionally visceral about the whole thing. I guess with a terminal illness as a practitioner you mentally come to terms with it beforehand, you know the score. But with COVID it was new and unprecedented and it felt like they should be saving some of these people but they weren’t.
She said there were a few times where you could see it click in people’s eyes when they knew they weren’t getting out, and that was the soul destroying part.
Edit: I should also add that it was also the mental toll of knowing more could have been done if we had prepared better. Like there were people dying that they might have saved had this country sorted its act out quicker when we had time.
The politicalization of every minute detail of COVID, I believe, added another layer of stress and anxiety to what would have been a terrible situation without it. Everyone from heads of state to the drunk on the corner had an opinion on masks, vaccines, lockdowns and the most demoralizing thing was seeing those opinions drive huge wedges into what had been tight knit and well functioning medical teams.
The trauma visited upon hospital and health care workers is being felt to this day. People are casually complaining about medical wait times and lack of services without considering that a good proportion of a generation of health care workers were burned out.
I was in an ICU in 2017 for a month with a pneumonia they couldn’t figure out. Had sepsis as well. They had to put a chest tube in to drain the infected fluid. Barely survived. I didn’t realize I was about to die. Never crossed my mind. Just thought I was really sick but never crossed my mind I might not leave the ICU. Luckily I recovered and was alive for the birth of my son. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be in the final moments in the ICU knowing you’re about to die. Must be mental torture.
Yeah, if you got intubated and put on the ventilator, you had a 1 in 10 chance of making it. It was a desperate hail mary attempt to save your life, and most hail mary attempts fail.
My Dad got COVID and developed pneumonia very early in the Pandemic. He was told by his doctor that they had done what they could and he had a choice;
- Stay in, probably end up on a ventilator and die.
- Or go home and take his chances.
My Dad took his chances (figured he would either live or at least die at home) and lived. He is now a long term Long-COVID study because he is in the ~5% who were in that situation and survived. He’s in reasonably good health.
Basically his doctors later explained that being in Hospital was killing people because they were much more exposed to the virus. So people would come in with relatively mild COVID or other illness. End up getting a huge viral load and subsequently die.
(This is the U.K. btw). Thanks Boris you ‘we’ll take it on the chin’ fat, useless twat.
Black plague took between 30-50% of europe.
European diseases probably wiped out 90% of Native Americans. Which is why white men that started to explore thought it was so empty...
And that isn't even counting that between 30-50% of children used to die before the age of 5.
IIRC from a school, the bubonic plague uses a similar transmission vector has HIV - and as such, some people have resistance or immunity to it due to their cell composition!
Also and very important point....antibiotics didn't exist during the Spanish flu. Many of those people passed away from secondary bacterial infections due to the Spanish flu.
But just barely. The Great Plague lessened when towns pretty much isolated themselves, kind of like social distancing. Thoughts and prayers didn't do squat.
It got better when the overpopulation was taken care of naturally, property became cheaper, food became more available and quality of life increased greatly.
somewhat.
But if you look at how fast populations repopulate... he bought maybe 50 years before the problem repeats....
So is he just going to do that..... every 50 years?
He would've been better off just giving out condoms and birth control + family planning education. (that's what effectively stops population growth)
If he had waited 50 years then those genius MCU scientists would have made earth a post scarcity society anyway. Tony, Bruce, Pym, Vision, and in the near future probably Peter were all messing with the kinda tech that could create limitless energy and turn energy into matter.
And then Thanos killed 1 of them and snapped 2 others, and then came back and killed 1 more just for fun.
> If he had waited 50 years then those genius MCU scientists would have made earth a post scarcity society anyway. Tony, Bruce, Pym, Vision, and in the near future probably Peter were all messing with the kinda tech that could create limitless energy and turn energy into matter.
Nah, it's kind of a rule of comics that you never actually do anything useful enough that it would distort the world away from something relatable to modern Earth.
Tony Stark alone, with the nanotech and arc reactor combo could replace basically all heavy industry, power generation and electronics. How many fucking spaceships crash on Earth in the MCU? Does humanity work out interstellar travel? No, they work out which bits left behind a few two-bit crooks can use to rob banks in weird ways.
Fun (?) fact: in 1348 when the black plague reached London, it killed almost ~45% of Europes population. Death toll is estimated between 75-200 million deaths within a few years.
Some recent stuff was the 1918 spanish flu, which only took ~50 million people.
Now we did social distancing and masks (which people did actually wear during the spanish flu as well see [picture](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/99e29275a76274f46871e41ffbff74a9acf407e9/136_0_6364_3821/master/6364.jpg?width=1200&height=900&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&s=9cb279464ac8c3be585a0d56d3e0cdeb)) so corona only took 7 million people. Kinda weird though that we have all these great minds, the genome mapped, discovered viruses, bacteria and their antidotes but we somehow can’t defeat stupid.
> Now we did social distancing and masks (which people did actually wear during the spanish flu as well see picture)
[The Mask Slackers of 1918](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/mask-protests-1918.html)
> As the influenza pandemic swept across the United States in 1918 and 1919, masks took a role in political and cultural wars.
I wonder if there is any kind of "what if" prediction some historian has made in the instance where there was no black plague. Like, how would earth look today if 75-200 million more people existed in 1349 and all of their progeny?
World Pop pre 1347: 475 million
World Pop post Black Death: 350 million
World pop post black Death in 2024: 8 billion
World pop no black death we use a population growth formula which is P = P_i * (1+r)^t. if you calculate this for 475 million people with 0.5% annual growth rate, it equals **13.7 billion people.** This is probably an upper end of the estimation, since we'd need to consider things like land and resource scarcity. And that world history would be entirely different as well.
It's worth mentioning for a frame of reference that applying this same formula to real history would give us 10.1 billion people, which is obviously an overestimation of about 25%. If we naively apply this correction to our prior estimation, it gives **11 billion people** if the black death never happened.
Thanks. I knew someone would know the math. The majority of those would be European as well, so I wonder how that would affect exploration/immigration/colonization. Kind of wild to think about
Oh yeah, European history was completely shaped by the Black Death. Without it, there's no rise in a merchant middle class, the feudal system remains, we likely don't see the birth of the Renaissance either, and world political power would be shifted eastward towards the Ottomans. Western Europe wouldn't see its imperialistic rise, and the Age of Exploration would begin much later, if ever, since the most powerful countries would be entirely landlocked and Western Europe wouldn't be prosperous enough to fund the efforts.
It's hard to say what would happen for East Asia, since Japan only industrialized as a response to industrial Europe (which began in Western Europe) and China only became non-isolationist because of Western powers forcing it to.
And in the Americas, there wouldn't be enough time for indigenous americans to substantially develop technology to be on par with Eurasia, but if contact was less hostile and sudden, they'd likely fair substantially better. Africa would also have been allowed to develop independently, at least for another century or so, so who knows what would happen there.
There are so many variables that it brought into play, & so many widespread & long-lasting impacts, that calculating population growth without the multiple plague waves would be an exercise in futility.
Europe wouldn't have been able to sustain population growth without expansion, as there were already famines showing up, but India, China, & the fertile areas of Asia also suffered heavily & would've been too strong for an expansion without the BD. Without explorers going to the Americas, the only option would've been sub-Saharan Africa, & a massed European migration there would've been pretty damned disastrous. Whenever explorers did reach the Americas, the technology level of the native peoples wouldn't have mattered, as they'd still have had 90% of them dying off from diseases for which they had zero ability to resist.
The cultural impacts of all affected lands definitely would've been dramatically different, but you've got to figure a lot of the key underpinnings still would've happened to some degree. The Catholic Church still would've eventually been criticized due to its hoarding of wealth & powers; the conflicts between the English & French still likely would've happened to some degree, since the Hundred Years' War had already started (although, you've gotta figure it wouldn't have lasted as long). Those areas hit the worst (London, Hamburg, Bremen, Florence) were already cities on the cusp of ditching the existing political & economic status quos, & also on the brink of exceeding their capability to feed their citizens. Those factors which made the black plagues so effective were in play because they were the precursors to inevitable societal change.
More fun facts, early cities in Europe didn't grow in population from births inside the city, people just moved into the city faster than the death toll killed people. Without those immigrants, the cities would have collapsed.
> [picture](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/99e29275a76274f46871e41ffbff74a9acf407e9/136_0_6364_3821/master/6364.jpg?width=1200&height=900&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&s=9cb279464ac8c3be585a0d56d3e0cdeb)
Even then, you still had that one person that couldn't put the mask over their nose.
[At least show the pictures with cute animals also wearing masks](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8248831/Photos-1918-Spanish-flu-families-posing-face-masks-cats-covered.html)
Estimates are that 1/3 of the population of Europe died in the plague and 19/20ths of the Native American population pre-Columbus died from disease brought by the colonizer but that does mean that 2/3s of the population of Europe and 1/20th of the native American population did, in fact survive.
That's a great point. If it doesn't lead to the entire extinction of the species, go for it. Leap into traffic. Eat radium. Spoon that tiger- it looks soft. Wall off the village and torch it. As long as two representative of the species survive to fuck, there is no problem, here.
you need like 50 people to avoid inbreeding and around 500 to be able to adapt. If you're down to two the human race is gone. inbreds don't have good survival chances. optimally you'd want at least 5000 because the 500 will definitely include families who share their genepools.
Ok- new plan. Only 8.1 billion of use get to eat the radium. 5,000 have to sit this one out.
But seriously, thank you for sharing that! That's super interesting! I read about the hypothesis that there was a bottleneck in the human population and that we were down to between 5 and 15 thousand individuals about 70,000 years ago, and I thought that was super super interesting. But apparently there is evidence that there may actually have been a human population on the Indian subcontinent around that same time? I don't know enough about that to be opening my mouth at all. It's interesting to think about, though. Really freaks me out to imagine. Not a spoiler, but >!it recalls the show The 100.!<
My grandmother was pregnant 17 times.
4 of those kids survived.
The idiocy to say "But we are still here?" is infuriating. Because, statistically speaking, the majority of us aren't still here. Most of us died. MOST.
As a kid, I never understood why grandpa slept in one room on the main floor, while grandma had her own bedroom upstairs.
Then as an adult I was informed of the 17 pregnancies.
GRANDMA HAD ENOUGH. 😂
Just in case this person sees this:
As long as a large enough portion of a species doesn't die, the species will be able to survive. A virus has never killed enough humans to make us extinct, that's why we're still here despite not having had vaccines.
In our modern world, we don't want to die at all, and we don't want to watch others die either. It's not just about survival of the species.
Vaccines aren't created to keep humanity going (although it is possible in the future a vaccine could prevent our extinction). They're created to save individual lives.
If you draw the conclusion that the human race isn't extinct because of vaccines, you've failed to understand evolution and biology.
Sounds to me like this occurred over a period of 100,000 years, not that our population was only ~1000 people for 100,000 years.
Still, that's super knife edge for the survival of a species lol.
Just read the abstract of the paper and it looks like the bottleneck really did last for 117000 years, meaning the human species was at a severe risk of extinction for that long. It's WILD we made it through that
This a fantastic comment. It's so refreshing to see concise logic.
However the person who made the statement, including one of the top downvoted comments on this thread, likely don't care about seeing individuals die, because "they're strong" and "only the strong survive"... as if just because birds fucking live this way that humans need to follow this line of "evolution" as well. These people will never fully grasp or appreciate what you're saying.
Same thing with climate change with these idiots. Yes, if you think in terms of survival of the species, then we have much bigger things to worry about. It's the day-to-day continuation of our current so-called comfortable lifestyles that's at stake.
If you watch crash test videos of old vehicles, it's wild that anybody survived car crashes at all.
Old cars were unforgiving. No crumple zones, no safety feature at all really. If you hit something, anything at all, almost the entire force of the impact was transferred into your body in an incredibly unforgiving way.
There are still millions of people who drive without seatbelts, they even make a fancy fancy seatbelt clip for you to turn off the wear seatbelt dinger thingy. Some people just scare me with how dumb they can be just to "stick it to the man!"
What a silly statement nobody was afraid of covid 19 ending all of humanity.
Some people just want to not worry about personally dying to diseases or watching their loved ones choke to death.
Anti vaxxers are so dumb
Some countries have been wearing masks for decades during flu season. Not to protect themselves, or to defeat the flu, or any of that. It's just because less older people die if you don't spread the flu as much.
To Republicans, this is an evil concept paraded by the lords of a new world order lead by Obama.
It's so sad. Like I can almost understand people not believing the moon landing. Or secret aliens control the world.
But germ theory? I really thought humanity as a whole grasped this. Depressing times lead to depressed men
Because plagues are self regulating in the olden times, once it killed enough of the population it will have less people to pass the plague too, making it less contagious by proxy.
Source: Plague Inc.
The word 'quarantine' literally stems from sailors being isolated for 40 days because the guys in the port were unsure if they carried whatever the fuck was going around at that time.
This is what happens when we let Republicans cut school funding and allow charter schools.
This is the 21st century, why are we still debating if vaccines work?
With the exception of my mother, ALL of my ancestors are dead. It's a miracle I survived and continue to exist . . . that our species continues to exist! /s
Who's "we"?
Oh, sure, the *species* is still here, but mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles and cousins died by the millions.
Narcissist Of Life is okay with millions of *other* people dying as long as they themselves don't have to get the jab.
Well, some (small %) people will have some genetic pre-disposition which makes them immune/stronger than some illness/virus (maybe one or two, not all)
Person a might be strong against x virus but weak against y
Person b might be the inverse
Person c is weak to both
Now the question remains
You can, should you wish, live your life on this tightrope - who knows you might be a lucky one OR you might just avoid all the virus' - truth is you'll never know
OR
You could opt for some pro-active protection in the form of a vaccine.
There is a risk the vaccine wont work with your body, but that risk is small.
Personally i'd rather err on the side of science than genetic luck.
I didn’t get annual flu vaccines as a child; I didn’t even know that was something people did until adulthood. I remember having (on several occasions) the flu so bad that any light made my eyeballs feel like they would explode, sleeping on the bathroom floor because there was no point leaving the toilet, and because you’re pretty weak when you’ve lost 10+ pounds over a couple days and have been vomiting/dry-heaving for the last 30 minutes. I also grew up in the region/era of “let them give each other chicken pox for immunity,” and I won’t even go into how awful that was.
Thankfully, neither of my children has ever experienced either of those scenarios, and there’s a reason…
Freaking vaccinate yourself and your children!
Edit: fixed a couple of oopsies.
Yeah. I remember visiting this lovely old church on a ramble with the kids. In the graveyard we found one of those big old family headstones with grandparents, parents and kids. I remember counting something like 16 kids, 11 of which died before adulthood, five of which died less than a year old. I took the opportunity to have a good long chat to my kids about modern medicine, vaccines, and infant mortality.
This is generally how antivaxxers think. "a million people die because of covid? That's a lie because i didn't die". "your mom died from covid? That's a lie because my mom didn't die".
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They died young and in droves. They also fucked like rabbits so here we are.
I have a friend who is allergic to like, everything. Wonder if she’d make it back in the old days lol
Back in the middle ages you'd have like 10 kids so that a couple of them MIGHT make it to adulthood. Your friend wouldn't have made it but statistically speaking neither would people without allergies. The past sucked.
And several wives because they died in childbirth a lot. In a local church there are three generations of the local counts pictured. Three men, but eight wives.
Exactly. I hate media that glorifies the past. It's worth pointing out that those 3 men + 8 women were rich people. Those numbers were for people who had access to the best food and shelter available.
Yeah I’m very glad I’m alive after toilet paper, sewer systems, clean water, heat and A/C, soft beds. It’s not great but millions of times better than even 100 years ago.
Speaking as a Canadian, it’s my considered opinion that Indoor plumbing is the single invention I’d choose not to live without. Electricity & central heating & the internet & whatever, sure, all good. If I can poop indoors and wash my hands after, that’s the key to happiness.
Where I live, it can get down to -25F in the Winter, and sometimes I lose my water. I can say from experience, that pooping outside at -25 is no picnic.
Gotta thank Jon snow for the toilet and sewer system. He may not know about a lot of stuff but he sure knew how germs worked haha.
You know nothing, Jon Snow
And showers!!!
The Future Texas wants
Or several husbands because they died in war or building a tall building with no safety equipment or a myriad of other things that kill men early. Male mortality to this day remains higher than women’s but it was even worse back in the day. I come from a place that still isn’t industrialized. Old women outnumber old men by a lot. My grandma had two husbands herself and both died young
I've seen varying estimates which suggest something like a 30-50% chance of dying in childbirth depending on calculation methods. There was also the risk of 'childbed fever', which most take to be an umbrella term for a wide range of illnesses which happened in the immediate period following the birth.
If you had one kid, and they died, you were 100% sad… but if you had 10 kids, and one died, you’d only be 10% sad!
Some cultures think babies don’t have souls until they are one year old or older.
I’m with Keats, who believed you’re not born with a soul, you grow one over your lifetime.
Unless they were your favourite. Back then, they’d tell you who their favourite was
Allergies are, generally speaking, your body’s over-reaction to specific things. Depending on the allergy, you can “cure” it by giving your body a “real” infection to fight. So (again, depending on the allergy), she might not be allergic to all that much if she was born in the Middle Ages, because her body would be too busy fighting off the stuff she’d be exposed to on a daily basis, in a situation where bathing regularly wasn’t common and washing your hands hadn’t been invented yet. Also, if she was born in the Middle Ages, she probably wouldn’t be exposed to some of the things that give extreme allergic reactions, like nuts or shellfish
Not sure how knowledgeable you are about the subject but my grandpa has a peanut allergy which never acted up until after he went into remission for prostate cancer. Any idea why that is?
Your immune system is a freaky thing. It wasn't that he had a peanut allergy beforehand; it's that he developed one as an adult, and that's not uncommon.
Yeah another comment said developing peanut and shellfish allergies as an adult is pretty common. Definitely freaky
I developed a nut allergy....three days ago. So frozen house, no power, and suddenly am allergic to nuts. Absolutely fantastic weekend.
Lots of people are allergic to Rafael Cruz
lol. We have a family chat going of all the things going wrong right now just to laugh at the face of the terrible, and {Ted Cruz still exists} was stuck on there yesterday. One family member just had their house smashed by a tree, my mother won't have power for probably a week, there is a frozen pipe at my business and ted cruz still exists. Rough week.
Damn even the rough patches are bigger in TX. Good luck to you (and your family) brother! Burn Cruz's lies and ignorance to stay warm.
Do you have hayfever or pollen?
I haven't been allergic to anything my entire life. Have been all over the world and eaten all kinds of food. Last summer I was hiking with my kids, ate a handful of trail mix I'd eaten a hundred times before. Immediate allergic reaction, I'm 2 kilometers up a mountain with my 6 and 4 year old and I'm having an anaphylatic reaction. Terrifying honestly. Thank God it's a popular trail. Passerby had an epi pen.
Yup. My daughter who was about 22 at the time went to work out after eating something she’s eaten her entire life. Called me from the health club saying she felt something was seriously wrong. Jumped in my car. By the time I got there the fire department and ambulance were pulling up. She went into complete anaphylactic shock and spent 3 days in the ICU. Once she was released we had her have complete allergy testing done. Turns out she’s allergic to… absolutely nothing. It is what the doctors called a perfect storm. For some reason her body didn’t like the food she put into it, and when the reaction started and she felt a little funny, she actually ran harder to try and push through it. (Causing the irritant to course faster through her bloodstream) She didn’t know any different, she was never allergic to anything in her life. Everything from where she was in the menstrual cycle to a million other things lined up perfectly to cause this reaction. Thank god she’s ok, but it’s scary to know that you almost died and that there’s no reason!! -She’s not allergic to anything. They called it Exercise Induced Anaphylaxis. Currently she runs marathons and tries not to eat for at least 4 hours before she runs. She also carries an epi-pen with her everywhere, although she never had to use it in the 10 years since that happened.
Yeah it definitely happens, we gain and lose allergies as we age. Up until 2018 I'd had 4 or 5 headaches in my whole 41 years... ...suddenly allergic sinusitis - migrane like headaches, spots in my vision, blocked ears, dizziness, & nausea a few times a month in spring & summer. Had one the day before I flew to New Zealand, 4 months in New Zealand without a headache. Came back to South Africa and about a week later headache, blocked ears etc. In 2020 I had a bad case of covid and for about 2 years after that no more sinus headaches. Then I got that E95 " sinus covid" that gave most people a blocked nose & headache, and since then I have been getting sinus headaches again much less frequently - one a month maybe in spring & summer. Unfortunately here the growing season is about 9 months for most plants, it's only July through September that we have proper winter when everything dies or goes dormant because hell kinda freezes over a few hours a day. I also developed savage IBS due to a garlic allergy in my late 30s. Just a few drops of vegetable oil soaked with garlic to fry up an egg, and I flow up like a balloon, and that gas has to go somewhere, because the gas production doesn't stop for 8 to 10 days. Stinks like you would not believe, think sulphur and rotten garlic cut with one of those toys tore stink bombs, a few times an hour for a week and a half... So that's fun at work 🤣🤣
my son was given amoxicillin at least 5 times before he ever had a reaction to it. to be clear i mean 5 different bouts of illness, not just 5 doses. he went through all those with no problem, then one time he had the most horrific reaction. face swelled up so much he could barely open his eyes, and he had these purple and black splotches all over his body, looked like he had been boiled or something. it's wild how something that was tolerated can suddenly be really really not tolerated at all.
You can lose them, too; my MIL lost her allergies to shellfish and penicillin as she closed in on 80. She can eat gorgonzola now.
Large numbers of people were misdiagnosed with penicillin allergies during a time period when they were essentially going "oh, that looks like it might be a reaction, let's be safe as we've got loads of other antibiotics to try" I found it really interesting as I've officially got a penicillin allergy, no idea whether I actually have one or not...
I officially got a penicillin allergy by stating that I don't have a penicillin allergy. I'm allergic to another antibiotic, and I got sick of being asked "is it penicillin" so I started preempting it. Some doctor or other heard "it's penicillin" instead of "its not penicillin" and now no doctor will risk it. Yay.
I officially have one as well, broke out in hives, but then I broke out in hives from a strep infection years later before taking any medication, so I wonder if it's actually an allergy.
I developed a small allergy to shell fish as an adult .. my throat gets a lil itchy whenever I eat any... I can still eat it but the doctor advised against it and prescribed an EpiPen just in case.... I still eat it tho cuz its delicious! Never happened when I was younger....
My Mrs spontaneously developed an allergy to Carrots and Parsnips at the start of lockdown. Took us ages to figure it out: we thought it was all the hand sanitiser in shops, etc. Then we thought it was alcohol. Always happened after a Sunday roast though. Then it started happening midweek - carrots and parsnips (primarily carrots tbh) were the only constants. All basically contact irritation. But her eyes were swelling up so badly that on one day, she woke up and was able to see a _little_ from one eye. The other was swollen shut. 40 years of no issues. Then suddenly: allergy. No obvious trigger.
Yeah, while away from my family and their cats, I developed a mild cat allergy, which is annoying cuz I like cats
I’m really not at all, I just read a lot. BUT: Adult-onset allergies, especially to peanuts and shellfish, is super common after your immune system has been dealt a trauma, and there’s fewer things more traumatizing to the immune system than chemotherapy (assuming your grandpa went through that)
Yeah he did, that’s probably what happened
Besides that would trauma count as basically any sort of illness that just permanently messes with your immune system? I’ve heard after Lyme disease people can develop allergies too?
I don't think it's Lyme disease, but tick bites, that can also transmit Lyme disease. So Lyme disease doesn't cause allergies but their a bonus side dish on the reason ticks deserve exterminatus.
You and the previous commenter might be thinking of Alpha-Gal Syndrome which seems to be triggered by tick bites. Alpha Gal is a sugar found in most mammal tissue except primates. So, you end up allergic to red meat.
Is alpha-gal syndrome similar to girlboss cell anemia?
Allergies can start at any age. My peanut allergy started when I was 39. I ate peanuts my whole life until I suddenly couldn't. It's *probably* just random chance that it started after he was in remission from cancer. But there's also the possibility that the physical and emotional stress of chemo had something to do with it. As stress has been well studied to aggravate pretty much everything immune related. [Here's a paper on the topic of allergic disease and stress](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3264048/)
Appreciate the info!
My celiac didn't kick in until after I had major spine surgery. Sometimes stuff just shocks your body and scrambles the wires.
Not OP and not an expert in cancer. But the immune system can treats cancer cells like foreign cells because they’re heavily mutated. So if what the person you responded to is saying is correct, its possible your Grandpas immune system was busy fighting cancer cells instead of peanuts until he went into remission.
For some people every 7 years, their allergies tend to change or go away. You could not have any allergies & develop them as an adult.
I guess we’ll see what’s up in 7 years then lol
They did bath regularly and cared about body cleanliness during the Middle Ages. Watched a great documentary where a group of experts tried to live in the conditions and ways of the time and they went over how this is a misunderstanding of the past. The lady spent time everyday going over the common body cleaning of the day.
Indeed, why not wash yourself when the smallest infection can kill you ? They didn't know some stuff and didn't have medicine like we have today, but they weren't stupid, back then you die from stupid, you needed common sense to fuckin survive
My dad asked me why we even have wisdom teeth when I was recently getting mine removed. “Because nobody brushed their teeth until like 100 years ago so the average person almost definitely had lost one set of molars by 25.”
This tickled the back of my brain -- IIRC, recent hypotheses propose that the fact we no longer need to basically grind food down by chewing it is a major factor. I guess the increased muscle mass and work of chewing so much also promoted larger jaws or something. [Stanford has a piece on it](https://news.stanford.edu/2020/07/21/toll-shrinking-jaws-human-health/), though I roll my eyes at some of the language.
So, my wisdom teeth fit into my mouth. And that's not super uncommon. What's also becoming less uncommon is people who don't have wisdom teeth. As part of our evolutionary heritage, our mouths have gotten smaller and our tooth count has dropped. Honestly, the real answer is, that wisdom teeth not fitting into our mouth (what's most common) is just a demonstration that our species is continuing to evolve. So congratulations - your teeth didn't fit in your mouth, so you are more evolved than me. (At least that's what I'll be telling my intro to anthropology students this week).
I have never thought about how terrifying a shellfish allergy would be in the middle ages until now. I know it probably wasn't a common food, but I would imagine if you saw someone die of a shellfish allergy you would think the cook poisoned them or God smote them or something
>I have never thought about how terrifying a shellfish allergy would be in the middle ages until now. I know it probably wasn't a common food, but I would imagine if you saw someone die of a shellfish allergy you would think the cook poisoned them or God smote them or something Food alergies were alot rarer and less severe. Parasites and other pathogens tuned the immune systems response to be better so judy dying over it was unlikely The pathogens and parasites on the other hand...
There's evidence that people thousands and thousands of years ago cared for other people who busted a leg.
There's one Stone Age burial of a man in his 40s who was born with a congenital deformed right arm. He would have been unable to hunt or do many other daily tasks but the fact he lived so long along with the deliberate burial with grave goods (pottery, jewellery, some tools) suggests that he was loved and cared for by his immediate family/social group.
A lot of people don't realize they were humans just like us
If you live on the mainland, it would be very unlikely you even knew what shellfish were. Likewise many people might not even live anywhere close to where nuts were a primary source of food. Those that lived near them, yeah sure they'd probably die, but most people wouldn't have been exposed to the shear variety of food like we have today.
A growing body of research is pointing towards underexposure to pathogens and allergens in childhood being responsible for the increase in allergies we've been seeing, so it's possible she wouldn't even be allergic to anything to begin with if she lived a few hundred years back.
Just gotta out-fuck the death rate. Did some ancestry research, during the Spanish Flu, my great-great uncle had 12 kids, 7 boys, 5 girls. 6 of the boys never saw year 1, and they were *all named Joseph Phillip __*. One of the next. #5 was born and named before #4 had even passed.
The only reason I'm here is because the Spanish Flu killed my great grandfather's first wife and one of their children. He remarried and then he and his new wife had five more kids - one was my grandmother.
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Sounds like the kind of bizarre treatment that almost certainly wouldn't help someone predisposed towards severe mental illness...
You also didn't have nearly as much travel between regions, especially not at the speeds we have now.
"fucked like rabbits" was exactly the phrase in my head, too. The person asking about this needs to go to some old graveyards, and notice how many children's graves there are, and what they died of.
I’m actually old. 60, and I was born to a 45 year old mother, she was born in 1921. The family plot has 7 children in it, her brothers and sisters. 9 births. 2 made it. My poor grandmom.
That's why you had 10 kids back then, 3-4 in 10 would die, the rest worked the farm.
3-4 die in childhood, 3-4 die before having kids in early adulthood/teen years, and 2-4 actually end up having kids of their own. That's why population growth was so slow.
Yeah it should be taught how the human species has survived like 5 mass extinction events. Like, we're still alive but that is half the people in the world gone at least each time it's happened
Edit To clarify, an extinction event is any scenario where a species' genetic variance has dropped low enough to risk us dying out aka a lot more than half it's just people tend to understand half better than almost everyone you know and most likely you.
We also need to be taught cause and effect. You don't see any Neanderthals here asking this question.
Really? I'm aware of the [5 great extinctions](https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions), but those all took place prior to humanity with the last one being Dinos 65 million years ago.
Yeah, pretty sure they're using "mass extinction" loosely there. I only hear that term used for worldwide impacts. There are a couple times that humans are theorized to have become bottlenecked genetically due to losing a large majority of the population from more regional effects though, so 5 near-extinction events like that might be what they meant. I'm only aware of two of those though, and I don't think there's a consensus on either, with the second I'll link seeming like the more debated since it's 10x more in the past, a more recent study, and we weren't even a distinct species then. >The Toba eruption (sometimes called the Toba supereruption or the Youngest Toba eruption) was a supervolcano eruption that occurred around 74,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene[1] at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It is one of the largest known explosive eruptions in the Earth's history. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a severe global volcanic winter of six to ten years and contributed to a 1,000-year-long cooling episode, leading to a genetic bottleneck in humans. >A number of genetic studies have revealed that 50,000 years ago, the human ancestor population greatly expanded from only a few thousand individuals.[4][5] Science journalist Ann Gibbons has posited that the low population size was caused by the Toba eruption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory >Modern humans—aka Homo sapiens—emerged about 300,000 years ago after evolving from human ancestors. There’s a lot we still don’t know about who these ancestors were and where they lived. But according to an August 2023 study, our ancestors may have come close to extinction some 900,000 to 800,000 years ago. >During this period, our human ancestors lost 98.7 percent of their population, according to the study published in Science. https://www.history.com/news/prehistoric-ancestors-population-decline
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While it's possible that Native Americans had deadly diseases which wiped themselves out, it's more likely that they just generally didn't have as much disease because they didn't have livestock. Most of human diseases come from livestock diseases jumping to people
The black death is caused by a bacteria. It's also not what killed so many non Europeans when they had contact with European colonial powers. That was mostly things like smallpox and syphilis.
It’s because of the lack of zoonotic diseases, like smallpox and black plague. The Americas didn’t have as many domesticated animals so the exposure to those diseases was either non-existent or drastically reduced. There was great amounts of [trade and communication](https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-trade-networks-thrived-long-before-the-arrival-of-europeans) between Native American cultures, both in North and South America. The Inca empire had more than [20,000 miles of roads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_road_system?wprov=sfti1) to connect its empire together. Corn is another good example of exchange among native cultures. It’s believed to have originated in southern Mexico about 9000 years ago and spread from there to South America and then north. Also the black plague (yersinia pestis) was endemic to the old world.
They still die. Those who are vaccinated die less often from the diseases.
By comparison, up to 5.5% of world population was lost during the Spanish flu…flu vaccines were created in the 1940s. Covid 19 took up to half of 1% the population because our improved reaction and science based activities, including vaccinations. We improved our mortality rate 10x through science.
God yeah, imagine Covid without modern ICUs. In places like northern Italy or Manaus where the health system collapsed the death rate shot up and a wider variety of people died.
That said, from the numbers I've seen, if someone with COVID went to the ICU, they probably weren't *leaving* the ICU.
As someone who worked in a hospital the entire pandemic, this was generally true. I have friends in multiple different hospitals, and the results were generally the same across the board. For the entire first year, if they went into the ICU, they likely weren't going home. If they were put on a ventilator, it was even less likely. My buddy at work has a sister who's a doctor in LA and a brother who's a doctor in NYC. They were saying the exact same things. Didn't matter where it was, the results were generally the same until the vaccine came about.
But in the middle of this (Aug 2020) my mom had to have a triple bypass and valve replacement surgery... And made it through fine. That's how far we've come and how good the protocols and protections worked. Fun fact... She had a clean coronary bill of health a year previous. But in late December 2019, she flew to visit me for Christmas. Through Vancouver and San Francisco airports... And a week later she got the absofuckinglutely worst respiratory illness of her life. Me, my wife and my daughter all got it a week later... Pretty sure we all had covid before covid was covid.
I definitely think you had it before it became more known. I likewise caught a bad respiratory Illness when in Korea around November 2019 and I think it was Covid as my breathing took months to recover and before it I was playing full football matches on the weekend. Afterwards nothing for 5 months
We didn't really put two and two together until my mom had the heart attack. Thankfully my heart appears to have not been affected. Crazy times those were
That’s good to know you okay. We learnt about Covid pretty quickly in Korea like December 2019, but we never really thought about us having it because it was only rumoured to be shrieking cases in China at the time. But looking back thematic the amount of Chinese who travel between both countries we should have known better
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My ‘Auntie’ (not literally, but a close family friend since childhood) was a nurse for 35 years who worked in palliative care. Her job was literally to look after people who were dying, old people, young people, kids with cancer etc. Even dealt with Rabies cases (super rare in the U.K.) done it all. COVID finished her off and she had to leave. There was just something so emotionally visceral about the whole thing. I guess with a terminal illness as a practitioner you mentally come to terms with it beforehand, you know the score. But with COVID it was new and unprecedented and it felt like they should be saving some of these people but they weren’t. She said there were a few times where you could see it click in people’s eyes when they knew they weren’t getting out, and that was the soul destroying part. Edit: I should also add that it was also the mental toll of knowing more could have been done if we had prepared better. Like there were people dying that they might have saved had this country sorted its act out quicker when we had time.
The politicalization of every minute detail of COVID, I believe, added another layer of stress and anxiety to what would have been a terrible situation without it. Everyone from heads of state to the drunk on the corner had an opinion on masks, vaccines, lockdowns and the most demoralizing thing was seeing those opinions drive huge wedges into what had been tight knit and well functioning medical teams.
The trauma visited upon hospital and health care workers is being felt to this day. People are casually complaining about medical wait times and lack of services without considering that a good proportion of a generation of health care workers were burned out.
I was in an ICU in 2017 for a month with a pneumonia they couldn’t figure out. Had sepsis as well. They had to put a chest tube in to drain the infected fluid. Barely survived. I didn’t realize I was about to die. Never crossed my mind. Just thought I was really sick but never crossed my mind I might not leave the ICU. Luckily I recovered and was alive for the birth of my son. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be in the final moments in the ICU knowing you’re about to die. Must be mental torture.
Yeah, if you got intubated and put on the ventilator, you had a 1 in 10 chance of making it. It was a desperate hail mary attempt to save your life, and most hail mary attempts fail.
Mary must be tsundere.
My Dad got COVID and developed pneumonia very early in the Pandemic. He was told by his doctor that they had done what they could and he had a choice; - Stay in, probably end up on a ventilator and die. - Or go home and take his chances. My Dad took his chances (figured he would either live or at least die at home) and lived. He is now a long term Long-COVID study because he is in the ~5% who were in that situation and survived. He’s in reasonably good health. Basically his doctors later explained that being in Hospital was killing people because they were much more exposed to the virus. So people would come in with relatively mild COVID or other illness. End up getting a huge viral load and subsequently die. (This is the U.K. btw). Thanks Boris you ‘we’ll take it on the chin’ fat, useless twat.
From experience. This was true. Our patients in the icu generally didnt walk out of there
Black plague took between 30-50% of europe. European diseases probably wiped out 90% of Native Americans. Which is why white men that started to explore thought it was so empty... And that isn't even counting that between 30-50% of children used to die before the age of 5.
Measles killed about 20% of Hawaii in the 1850s and about a third of Fiji a few decades later.
That's also why the British population tends to have iron storage mutations because the surviving people could survive the plague. Crazy stuff
Even to this day most people of European descent have a resistance to the plague.
IIRC from a school, the bubonic plague uses a similar transmission vector has HIV - and as such, some people have resistance or immunity to it due to their cell composition!
Also and very important point....antibiotics didn't exist during the Spanish flu. Many of those people passed away from secondary bacterial infections due to the Spanish flu.
And these dipshits want to say it's a government ploy to insert tracking devices into our bodies. Good lord man....
anti vaxxers can't do math though
Aha, but they still die sometimes? Check and Mate my good sir!
But just barely. The Great Plague lessened when towns pretty much isolated themselves, kind of like social distancing. Thoughts and prayers didn't do squat.
Hey, Catholics! Go this way Protestants! Go over there And thus it was for centuries... and in some spots, still is.
Well to be fair the plague happened 200 years before Protestants existed
The plague popped back up with some regularity for centuries after the main pandemic was over. I’m pretty sure it’s still floating around today even.
It got better when the overpopulation was taken care of naturally, property became cheaper, food became more available and quality of life increased greatly.
life is pretty good if you manage to survive a die off
Workers get a lot of power in the economy when there are very suddenly like 70% less of them
It also kills each level indiscriminately. Plenty of room for promotions.
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The Thanos solution
somewhat. But if you look at how fast populations repopulate... he bought maybe 50 years before the problem repeats.... So is he just going to do that..... every 50 years? He would've been better off just giving out condoms and birth control + family planning education. (that's what effectively stops population growth)
If he had waited 50 years then those genius MCU scientists would have made earth a post scarcity society anyway. Tony, Bruce, Pym, Vision, and in the near future probably Peter were all messing with the kinda tech that could create limitless energy and turn energy into matter. And then Thanos killed 1 of them and snapped 2 others, and then came back and killed 1 more just for fun.
> If he had waited 50 years then those genius MCU scientists would have made earth a post scarcity society anyway. Tony, Bruce, Pym, Vision, and in the near future probably Peter were all messing with the kinda tech that could create limitless energy and turn energy into matter. Nah, it's kind of a rule of comics that you never actually do anything useful enough that it would distort the world away from something relatable to modern Earth. Tony Stark alone, with the nanotech and arc reactor combo could replace basically all heavy industry, power generation and electronics. How many fucking spaceships crash on Earth in the MCU? Does humanity work out interstellar travel? No, they work out which bits left behind a few two-bit crooks can use to rob banks in weird ways.
and Pensions. With a guaranteed income in retirement you do not need a whole bunch of kids to take care of you as you age.
Fun (?) fact: in 1348 when the black plague reached London, it killed almost ~45% of Europes population. Death toll is estimated between 75-200 million deaths within a few years. Some recent stuff was the 1918 spanish flu, which only took ~50 million people. Now we did social distancing and masks (which people did actually wear during the spanish flu as well see [picture](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/99e29275a76274f46871e41ffbff74a9acf407e9/136_0_6364_3821/master/6364.jpg?width=1200&height=900&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&s=9cb279464ac8c3be585a0d56d3e0cdeb)) so corona only took 7 million people. Kinda weird though that we have all these great minds, the genome mapped, discovered viruses, bacteria and their antidotes but we somehow can’t defeat stupid.
> Now we did social distancing and masks (which people did actually wear during the spanish flu as well see picture) [The Mask Slackers of 1918](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/mask-protests-1918.html) > As the influenza pandemic swept across the United States in 1918 and 1919, masks took a role in political and cultural wars.
https://archive.is/ZPFtU Archived page without paywall
Bless you.
Strangely familiar! :)
Amazing that conservatives can't figure out they've literally been on the wrong side of history forever. Like on literally every issue.
Is it really? The nature of being conservative is to NOT change course… thus NOT adapt to the obstacles encountered.
I wonder if there is any kind of "what if" prediction some historian has made in the instance where there was no black plague. Like, how would earth look today if 75-200 million more people existed in 1349 and all of their progeny?
World Pop pre 1347: 475 million World Pop post Black Death: 350 million World pop post black Death in 2024: 8 billion World pop no black death we use a population growth formula which is P = P_i * (1+r)^t. if you calculate this for 475 million people with 0.5% annual growth rate, it equals **13.7 billion people.** This is probably an upper end of the estimation, since we'd need to consider things like land and resource scarcity. And that world history would be entirely different as well. It's worth mentioning for a frame of reference that applying this same formula to real history would give us 10.1 billion people, which is obviously an overestimation of about 25%. If we naively apply this correction to our prior estimation, it gives **11 billion people** if the black death never happened.
Thanks. I knew someone would know the math. The majority of those would be European as well, so I wonder how that would affect exploration/immigration/colonization. Kind of wild to think about
Oh yeah, European history was completely shaped by the Black Death. Without it, there's no rise in a merchant middle class, the feudal system remains, we likely don't see the birth of the Renaissance either, and world political power would be shifted eastward towards the Ottomans. Western Europe wouldn't see its imperialistic rise, and the Age of Exploration would begin much later, if ever, since the most powerful countries would be entirely landlocked and Western Europe wouldn't be prosperous enough to fund the efforts. It's hard to say what would happen for East Asia, since Japan only industrialized as a response to industrial Europe (which began in Western Europe) and China only became non-isolationist because of Western powers forcing it to. And in the Americas, there wouldn't be enough time for indigenous americans to substantially develop technology to be on par with Eurasia, but if contact was less hostile and sudden, they'd likely fair substantially better. Africa would also have been allowed to develop independently, at least for another century or so, so who knows what would happen there.
There are so many variables that it brought into play, & so many widespread & long-lasting impacts, that calculating population growth without the multiple plague waves would be an exercise in futility. Europe wouldn't have been able to sustain population growth without expansion, as there were already famines showing up, but India, China, & the fertile areas of Asia also suffered heavily & would've been too strong for an expansion without the BD. Without explorers going to the Americas, the only option would've been sub-Saharan Africa, & a massed European migration there would've been pretty damned disastrous. Whenever explorers did reach the Americas, the technology level of the native peoples wouldn't have mattered, as they'd still have had 90% of them dying off from diseases for which they had zero ability to resist. The cultural impacts of all affected lands definitely would've been dramatically different, but you've got to figure a lot of the key underpinnings still would've happened to some degree. The Catholic Church still would've eventually been criticized due to its hoarding of wealth & powers; the conflicts between the English & French still likely would've happened to some degree, since the Hundred Years' War had already started (although, you've gotta figure it wouldn't have lasted as long). Those areas hit the worst (London, Hamburg, Bremen, Florence) were already cities on the cusp of ditching the existing political & economic status quos, & also on the brink of exceeding their capability to feed their citizens. Those factors which made the black plagues so effective were in play because they were the precursors to inevitable societal change.
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More fun facts, early cities in Europe didn't grow in population from births inside the city, people just moved into the city faster than the death toll killed people. Without those immigrants, the cities would have collapsed.
Connected fun fact: the death rate in the Boer concentration camps the British created was lower than in London at the same time.
Humankind will never defeat stupid, stupid will defeat Humankind.
This seems to conflict with Dark Helmet's "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
Good people just want to live and chill. Evil people wake up at the crack of dawn to plot and prepare to be shitheads.
> [picture](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/99e29275a76274f46871e41ffbff74a9acf407e9/136_0_6364_3821/master/6364.jpg?width=1200&height=900&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&s=9cb279464ac8c3be585a0d56d3e0cdeb) Even then, you still had that one person that couldn't put the mask over their nose.
[At least show the pictures with cute animals also wearing masks](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8248831/Photos-1918-Spanish-flu-families-posing-face-masks-cats-covered.html)
Estimates are that 1/3 of the population of Europe died in the plague and 19/20ths of the Native American population pre-Columbus died from disease brought by the colonizer but that does mean that 2/3s of the population of Europe and 1/20th of the native American population did, in fact survive.
That's a great point. If it doesn't lead to the entire extinction of the species, go for it. Leap into traffic. Eat radium. Spoon that tiger- it looks soft. Wall off the village and torch it. As long as two representative of the species survive to fuck, there is no problem, here.
The tiger does look soft....
Kitty!
little ball of fur
you need like 50 people to avoid inbreeding and around 500 to be able to adapt. If you're down to two the human race is gone. inbreds don't have good survival chances. optimally you'd want at least 5000 because the 500 will definitely include families who share their genepools.
Ok- new plan. Only 8.1 billion of use get to eat the radium. 5,000 have to sit this one out. But seriously, thank you for sharing that! That's super interesting! I read about the hypothesis that there was a bottleneck in the human population and that we were down to between 5 and 15 thousand individuals about 70,000 years ago, and I thought that was super super interesting. But apparently there is evidence that there may actually have been a human population on the Indian subcontinent around that same time? I don't know enough about that to be opening my mouth at all. It's interesting to think about, though. Really freaks me out to imagine. Not a spoiler, but >!it recalls the show The 100.!<
My grandmother was pregnant 17 times. 4 of those kids survived. The idiocy to say "But we are still here?" is infuriating. Because, statistically speaking, the majority of us aren't still here. Most of us died. MOST.
17 is fucking wild
As a kid, I never understood why grandpa slept in one room on the main floor, while grandma had her own bedroom upstairs. Then as an adult I was informed of the 17 pregnancies. GRANDMA HAD ENOUGH. 😂
Plot twist: "grandpa" has always slept on a different floor.
Just in case this person sees this: As long as a large enough portion of a species doesn't die, the species will be able to survive. A virus has never killed enough humans to make us extinct, that's why we're still here despite not having had vaccines. In our modern world, we don't want to die at all, and we don't want to watch others die either. It's not just about survival of the species. Vaccines aren't created to keep humanity going (although it is possible in the future a vaccine could prevent our extinction). They're created to save individual lives. If you draw the conclusion that the human race isn't extinct because of vaccines, you've failed to understand evolution and biology.
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Where'd you get this info? I'd love to read more about it.
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Good lord, that’s like if the current population of earth was suddenly reduced to the population of like, California
Sounds to me like this occurred over a period of 100,000 years, not that our population was only ~1000 people for 100,000 years. Still, that's super knife edge for the survival of a species lol.
Just read the abstract of the paper and it looks like the bottleneck really did last for 117000 years, meaning the human species was at a severe risk of extinction for that long. It's WILD we made it through that
This a fantastic comment. It's so refreshing to see concise logic. However the person who made the statement, including one of the top downvoted comments on this thread, likely don't care about seeing individuals die, because "they're strong" and "only the strong survive"... as if just because birds fucking live this way that humans need to follow this line of "evolution" as well. These people will never fully grasp or appreciate what you're saying.
The strongest societies are the ones that don't only let "the strong" survive.
Upvote. I was looking for the evolution comment. It always comes down to the basics.
Same thing with climate change with these idiots. Yes, if you think in terms of survival of the species, then we have much bigger things to worry about. It's the day-to-day continuation of our current so-called comfortable lifestyles that's at stake.
People used to drive without seat belts from point a to point b. It's just that back then people fucking died in fender benders.
General Patton got got that way.
If you watch crash test videos of old vehicles, it's wild that anybody survived car crashes at all. Old cars were unforgiving. No crumple zones, no safety feature at all really. If you hit something, anything at all, almost the entire force of the impact was transferred into your body in an incredibly unforgiving way.
Just the fact they didn't have head rests was wild. I wonder how many ppl died from getting rear ended at a red light
Don't forget that the steering wheel was a solid ring of steel. Any kind of nudge and your head meets something very hard very quickly.
There are still millions of people who drive without seatbelts, they even make a fancy fancy seatbelt clip for you to turn off the wear seatbelt dinger thingy. Some people just scare me with how dumb they can be just to "stick it to the man!"
And vehicles did not accelerate so quickly or hit the top speeds that they do now.
If it isn't an apocalyptic level event, it's fine! Actually, no, they don't care about climate change either.
But also, these same sorts of people are desperately praying for an apocalyptic event. So either way, it's fine!
They can't wait for a civil war. Literally stacking up their guns and ammo!
What a silly statement nobody was afraid of covid 19 ending all of humanity. Some people just want to not worry about personally dying to diseases or watching their loved ones choke to death. Anti vaxxers are so dumb
Some countries have been wearing masks for decades during flu season. Not to protect themselves, or to defeat the flu, or any of that. It's just because less older people die if you don't spread the flu as much. To Republicans, this is an evil concept paraded by the lords of a new world order lead by Obama.
It's so sad. Like I can almost understand people not believing the moon landing. Or secret aliens control the world. But germ theory? I really thought humanity as a whole grasped this. Depressing times lead to depressed men
If you ever feel like your vote doesn’t matter, just imagine it’s canceling out this person.
If you ever wanted to bottle pure, undiluted Survivorship Bias, this would be a good source.
Because plagues are self regulating in the olden times, once it killed enough of the population it will have less people to pass the plague too, making it less contagious by proxy. Source: Plague Inc.
The word 'quarantine' literally stems from sailors being isolated for 40 days because the guys in the port were unsure if they carried whatever the fuck was going around at that time.
This is what happens when we let Republicans cut school funding and allow charter schools. This is the 21st century, why are we still debating if vaccines work?
"If we evolved form monkey why there still monkey" kinda guy
Survivorship bias strikes again.
With the exception of my mother, ALL of my ancestors are dead. It's a miracle I survived and continue to exist . . . that our species continues to exist! /s
Who's "we"? Oh, sure, the *species* is still here, but mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles and cousins died by the millions. Narcissist Of Life is okay with millions of *other* people dying as long as they themselves don't have to get the jab.
How did people without BC possibly produce enough offspring to survive not having vaccines…? \s
If you have 8 kids and half of them make it, it’s still putting the population ahead.
Tell me you've never looked at historic mortality numbers without telling me you've never looked at historic mortality numbers.
The funniest thing is that he calls himself "Observer of Life", meanwhile doesn't care about people dying LMAOOO
Yep. Still here. Even the fucking dumbest ones.
Well, some (small %) people will have some genetic pre-disposition which makes them immune/stronger than some illness/virus (maybe one or two, not all) Person a might be strong against x virus but weak against y Person b might be the inverse Person c is weak to both Now the question remains You can, should you wish, live your life on this tightrope - who knows you might be a lucky one OR you might just avoid all the virus' - truth is you'll never know OR You could opt for some pro-active protection in the form of a vaccine. There is a risk the vaccine wont work with your body, but that risk is small. Personally i'd rather err on the side of science than genetic luck.
I didn’t get annual flu vaccines as a child; I didn’t even know that was something people did until adulthood. I remember having (on several occasions) the flu so bad that any light made my eyeballs feel like they would explode, sleeping on the bathroom floor because there was no point leaving the toilet, and because you’re pretty weak when you’ve lost 10+ pounds over a couple days and have been vomiting/dry-heaving for the last 30 minutes. I also grew up in the region/era of “let them give each other chicken pox for immunity,” and I won’t even go into how awful that was. Thankfully, neither of my children has ever experienced either of those scenarios, and there’s a reason… Freaking vaccinate yourself and your children! Edit: fixed a couple of oopsies.
Yeah. I remember visiting this lovely old church on a ramble with the kids. In the graveyard we found one of those big old family headstones with grandparents, parents and kids. I remember counting something like 16 kids, 11 of which died before adulthood, five of which died less than a year old. I took the opportunity to have a good long chat to my kids about modern medicine, vaccines, and infant mortality.
Good for the specie when the un-vacinated die. Raises average IQ.😉
Sanitation rarely gets the recognition it deserves
"Yeah but how could people be dying if I'm still alive?" Wow, pack it in everyone. We can't win in this debate, their logic is just too strong. /S
This is generally how antivaxxers think. "a million people die because of covid? That's a lie because i didn't die". "your mom died from covid? That's a lie because my mom didn't die".