Day 24 Friday

Another busy day today in preparing for on-line teaching next week. I participated in two training sessions, one in the morning and another in the afternoon and despite my trepidations, I actually learnt a few new things.

Cairns had its first that we know of, community transmission today, with a worker at the hospital pathology lab testing positive. They shut it down quickly for a deep clean and isolated the staff.

Those in the know are rightly, in my humble opinion, resisting the pressure to reopen all and sundry, as a second wave of community transmissions could well appear.

But while most people take this pandemic seriously, think about what it might have been like in the 1300 to 1800’s with the Black Death - a devastating global pandemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s.

When infected ships arrived, people gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe—almost one-third of the continent’s population and would sweep back again in the ensuing centuries.

Shakespeare was heavily influenced by the plague that swept through London and England a couple of centuries later.

According to that august body, the World Health Organization, there are still 1,000 to 3,000 cases of plague every year. I wonder how long it took them to find that out.

On that sombre note, I leave to prepare for tonight’s trivia, hosted by Andrew