Disease and disasters have occurred throughout time, mostly with disease causing the following disasters.
Plagues and pestilence have been around for ever, those microscopic bugs have an incredible time weaving their RNA (and DNA) into our DNA based life forms to further their survival, the apparent nature of life itself.
Life is a means of extending our DNA through eternity, just as RNA (and DNA) is the vessel that carries bacteria and vira throughout the eons.
Vira and bacteria (V and B) have been speculated to have been around since before double helixed life appeared, thus presenting the sordid possibility that out double helixed life may have been an aberrated bacteria or virus.
Whether the chicken or the egg came first is now academic, but all these life forms are here to stay.
Probably the most successful is the double helix as it appears to succeed more successfully in life, the mix and match of single helix breed particles allows for intelligent design with the weak being knocked aside for the better adaptive taking reign, thus changing over the course of time to make a better model.
The V and B need the double helixed (DH) life forms to pass on their DNA (or RNA), this implies that it does not appear to have adapted as well as the DH, but is still changing but not so radically.
Segue from science (or at least my imprint of poorly researched stuff) to belief, faith, or religion, as some may call it.
During earlier bouts of plague in ancient times, the belief was that God was showing disdain for the crew he created, humans, by casting said disease upon the population that were in effect the perpetrators things not Godly.
Examples would be:-
Noah and the floods, in a time before big city states took hold,
Sodom and Gomorrah where Lot and Abraham with families escaped before the aberrant behaviour of the residents caused destruction,
The 10 plagues cast on the Egyptians for placing the Jews in captivity and not releasing them, Moses being the main character,
100 odd other mentions in the Old Testament of disease and or destruction, lees so in the New Testament.
What is apparent to me, is that historians, or story tellers, created or weaved a story based upon human wickedness, but what was in effect the results of poor hygiene in large bodies of humans living in close proximity.
Take this latest episode of virus, purported to have been made in a Wuhan lab, accidentally or purposefully released via large numbers of Chinese expats leaving their ancestral homes to return to Western civilisations, spreading the virus far and wide.
During the early days, January to March 2020, the message from authorities was fairly benign, but then great numbers of older citizens in winter time civilisations began to die, so the new message of hygiene was created, face masks, hand washing, not touching other humans, coughing into elbow, and other means of non infecting, with a dramatic drop in deaths of the Wuhan flu, as well as other flus.
In times of old, populations died in high percentage numbers, from 30 to 40 per cent of populations, causing great loss of labour, knowledge and food sources.
In the current time, populations died in low percentage numbers, from 1 to 2 per cent of populations, causing governments to create shut downs , which have caused great loss of labour, knowledge (School shutdowns) and food sources (through loss of casual labour relied upon for fruit picking, et al).
The economic damage will be immense, it will carry on for half a century, with debt still around in First World Nations.
This is the burden the authorities have created for our Children, they will carry the burden of responsibility long after we are gone.
