Communication Failures in a Pandemic Can Be Catastrophic

The novel coronavirus poses an entirely new threat to Americans. Most of us have never experienced anything like it: sports seasons postponed, Broadway gone dark, and schools, businesses and restaurants shuttered.

But as alien as this experience is for us today, our ancestors experienced similar viral epidemics. In September 1485, a strange new illness swept through London. At the time, it was unlike anything Londoners had ever seen — according to several chroniclers, worse even than the bubonic plague. Perfectly healthy people suddenly broke out in a fevered sweat, and within hours, most were dead. Ralphael Holinshed’s “Chronicle of England” described the disease as “so cruel, that it killed some within three hours, some within two hours, some merry at dinner, and dead at supper.” As deaths mounted in London — nearly 15,000 out of an estimated population of 50,000, according to one account — life came to a halt. Fearful of the illness, Henry Tudor postponed his coronation, leaving England without an official ruler.

The “sweating sickness” that plagued England in 1485, and again in 1506, 1511, 1517, 1528, and finally, for the last time, in 1552, was probably caused by a novel virus. Modern epidemiologists believe that “the sweat,” as it was known in early modern England, may have been similar to modern hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), a disease spread via mouse feces that causes respiratory failure.

There are obvious similarities between the epidemic facing England in 1485 and the pandemic facing us in 2020, but most troubling of these may be that we are falling prey to the same failures in communication and errors in judgment. Despite all that has changed in 500 years, not least of which is the development of modern medicine, our ability to weather covid-19 may depend on learning from the mistakes of the past.