Pandemic: A Plague Coda

While there is plenty to say about how a pandemic affects us while we’re in the middle of it, there is just as much, if not more, to say about how a pandemic affects us when it ends.

As of May of 2023, over three years have passed since the outbreak of COVID-19 and, according to the President of the United States Joe Biden, the emergency has ended. And yet, many people around the world, but in America in particular, continue to grapple with the realities of the pandemic that wreaked havoc on our way of life and struggle with finding ways to move on. Whether that means refusing to admit that the emergency is indeed over and overindulging in the safety measures made normal during those past three years, or overindulging in the reactions against the sociopolitical and institutional realities made manifest, or simply living their lives, the coda to our disorder is anything but clean.

As made clear in the first pandemic episode covered on History Impossible, the effects of a global apocalypse have a way of heightening and letting loose what historian Norman F. Cantor called the “ideological anxieties” of their time and place. As is hopefully made clear in this sequel to that episode, the same can be said for how those apocalypses end. The so-called Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was by no means unique in how it helped create incentives some of the most significant changes of its time and place. In fact, almost 600 years earlier, another, far more devastating event had a very similar, and even more wide-reaching effect, especially when it was over: the Black Death. While it was certainly true that the plague was indeed a global pandemic, with the populations of the Arab and Chinese worlds being as deeply and profoundly affected by the disease as that of the European world, this is the story of how such a monumental disruption changed Europe—and thus modern history—forever, in some of the most fundamental ways imaginable.

We must thus ask: what if such after-effects and changes weren’t limited to one pandemic almost seven centuries ago, but perhaps any pandemic, given the correct historical circumstances existing? With those circumstances, what if a death toll in the tens if not hundreds of millions isn’t even required to make such changes manifest? These are the questions we’ll be exploring in this episode about what happens after the end of the world as we know it.

Infinite love and appreciation to Molly Pan for providing her immense musical talents to this episode. Make sure to stick around to the end to hear them.

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