For thousands of years food production relied on human labour, and about 90 per cent of people worked in farming. While in some parts of the developing world the human experience was still reminiscent of past plagues, in much of the developed world the digital revolution changed everything.Ĭonsider agriculture. Even more importantly, automation and the internet made extended lockdowns viable, at least in developed countries. In contrast, in 2020 digital surveillance made it far easier to monitor and pinpoint the disease vectors, meaning that quarantine could be both more selective and more effective.
And if you ordered the entire population of a country to stay at home for several weeks, it would have resulted in economic ruin, social breakdown and mass starvation. In 1918 you could quarantine people who came down with the dreaded flu, but you couldn’t trace the movements of pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers. In previous eras humanity could seldom stop epidemics because humans couldn’t monitor the chains of infection in real time, and because the economic cost of extended lockdowns was prohibitive. Moving life onlineĪlongside the unprecedented achievements of biotechnology, the Covid year has also underlined the power of information technology. In the war between humans and pathogens, never have humans been so powerful. Within less than a year several effective vaccines were in mass production. Within a few more months it became clear which measures could slow and stop the chains of infection. By January 10 2020, scientists had not only isolated the responsible virus, but also sequenced its genome and published the information online. The first alarm bells about a potential new epidemic began sounding at the end of December 2019. When the 1918 influenza struck, the best scientists in the world couldn’t identify the deadly virus, many of the countermeasures adopted were useless, and attempts to develop an effective vaccine proved futile. In previous eras, when humans faced a plague such as the Black Death, they had no idea what caused it or how it could be stopped. Why, then, has there been so much death and suffering? Because of bad political decisions. Science has turned them into a manageable challenge. Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. In fact, 2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless.
How can we summarise the Covid year from a broad historical perspective? Many people believe that the terrible toll coronavirus has taken demonstrates humanity’s helplessness in the face of nature’s might.