Bring Out Yer Dead!

 

Those masks to prevent contagion passing from one person to another aren’t something new. They started back in the Middle Ages (in reality, likely earlier than that), with masks that had birdlike beaks stuffed with herbal preventatives and covering the entire face, in addition to a hat.

Venice holds a ‘Plague Doctors Procession’ each year

There is nothing quite as cool as dressing completely black with a black hat, and wearing a beaked bird mask with the beak stuffed full of medicinal herbs, looking like an idiot. But it’s all in fun, right??

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-ppe-pestilence-medical-masks.html

In addition, from the historical viewpoint, masks became more and more sophisticated through time, especially when needed to protect a physician/surgeon and his assistants from lethal infections a surgical patient might have in the early 20^th century.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7309199/

While I rather like the beaked mask and the cranial and facial coverings of the Middle Ages, the theory of transmission of diseases by sneezing and coughing and simply by breathing in close quarters was in its infancy. There were no microscopes during the decades of bubonic plague and smallpox sweeping through Europe and the British Isles, although there were theories galore. It was not until Zacarias Janssen developed the microscope in 1590 that “living things” (microorganisms) could be seen in water. https://www.livescience.com/39649-who-invented-the-microscope.html

Per this article:  https://jmvh.org/article/the-history-of-plague-part-1-the-three-great-pandemics/

There have been three great world pandemics of plague recorded, in 541, 1347, and 1894 CE, each time causing devastating mortality of people and animals across nations and continents. On more than one occasion plague irrevocably changed the social and economic fabric of society. – article

Per this article at History.com, the Plagues invaded Europe at least 5 times, starting in the 6th century: https://www.history.com/news/pandemics-end-plague-cholera-black-death-smallpox

They were quite lethal, mostly because what we refer to as modern medicine was not available back in Them There Olden Days of Yore.  The Plague referred to was the Black Death, also known as bubonic plague (Yersinia  pestis) and is still available but is controlled with antibiotics these days. The other Plagues included smallpox, which European explorers transported to the New World with the resulting deaths of millions of aboriginal inhabitants, and cholera, which ravaged London through its drinking water supply.  And the term New World does not refer only to North America. It also refers to Central and South America, as well as the Far East which had been regularly visited, starting in the 14th century, by rounding the southern tip of Africa and following the trade winds into previously Undiscovered Countries. What’s known as the Great Plague of London actually started in China in 1334 and spread along trade routes, wiping out entire towns. Florence, Italy, lost a third of its 90,000 residents in the first six months. Overall, Europe lost 25 million people.

There is a Gift for the Givers in this: while European diseases such as smallpox and typhus spread into North and South America, the respondent disease which Europeans took home with them was syphilis.

We’ve come a long way since then. But there is nothing really new here with the CV19 virus and its accompanying virulent ability to spread; It is just a switch in materials used for protection and in discovery of microorganisms that cause diseases. The masks we’re being asked to wear are really designed more to protect us from what other people expel, and less about transmitting something unpleasant to others.

So I’ve given you guys some ammo to piss off the self-important slugs who want to scream bloody murder at everyone because “MASKSSSS!!!! , which will only protect YOU from THEM. And yes, you do want that protection. You don’t want whatever it is they’ve got, because — well, think of the children!!!!

The last update this morning was that the mortality rate is still dropping, just as it did with the 1918 Spanish flu’s rampage, and the actual percentage is far below the percentages of Medieval plagues. We’ve come a long way since those dismal days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcbR1J_4ICg

 

Category: "Teh Stoopid", "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", COVID-19