The gist of the story summarized by Bennett is that developments in genetics have allowed the specific strain of the bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, not only to be retrieved from fourteenth-century gravesites but also to be compared with every other completely sequenced genome of Y. Why redefine the Black Death? Transformative new information from genetics Understanding how pandemics have ended-or persisted-in the past is now an important objective. The present COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the urgency of learning how to talk comparatively about pandemics. ![]() Whereas his post focused on the reasons for pushing the origin story of the pandemic back into the thirteenth century, this blog post will turn to the question of why we should extend our narrative forward into the early modern period, when plague lived on as a continuing threat to populations in Eurasia and Africa. As he noted, that redefinition of geography also involves expanding the timeline of the late medieval plague pandemic. In a blog post for the OER Project Teacher Community in January 2022, Bennett Sherry offered a summary of my work redefining the geography of the Black Death as a pandemic that likely involved much larger landscapes than the regions of the Mediterranean and Europe usually included in maps and textbooks. “The Triumph of Death” a fifteenth-century fresco depicting the specter of death that continued to haunt Europe well after 1353. Arguments of causation or sequences of events that seemed clear can now seem anything but, prompting historians-and teachers-to think again. Narratives that we think of as tightly structured begin to fall apart. Major redefinitions of world historical events are a challenge to integrate into teaching. Or did it begin in March 2020, when it was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO)? And how will we know when it’s over? When the virus completely disappears? When hospitalizations decline? When the WHO tells us so? Or is there some other measure? ![]() As the world moves into the third year of the present COVID-19 pandemic, many governments-out of fatigue or for other reasons-are now declaring the pandemic “over.” What we’re seeing in real time is the playing out of a profound question in epidemiology: Just how is a pandemic defined? What constitutes a pandemic’s beginning and ending? Do we say a pandemic has “begun” once a pathogen spreads to humans? If so, in the case of COVID-19 the pandemic probably began sometime in late 2019.
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