This has led me to read about that period in Japanese history, about the introduction of tea, about the varieties of Buddhism that changed from ceremonial and strict to the more popular version that lets non intellectuals to get to heaven by taking Buddha as their Lord and savior without all that complicated rituals.
but anyway, one of the side issues is disease. Lots of child birth deaths, not just in Genji but in other related writings by ladies of those days.
But what about disease?
I am just starting to do research into the healing ceremonies, but one of the issues I ran across was infectious disease
Japan, being an island, and in rural areas in valleys tended to be isolated, was what in public health calls virgin territory: where no one is immune to a disease so the result is a huge number of deaths.
This is what happened to the American Indians for example. Or to the Europeans who got Syphillis in return
So back to Japanese history: This medical article summarized that country's experiences.
there was a major smallpox epidemic
The first recorded smallpox epidemic in Japan was in the eighth century. The smallpox that started in 735 ravaged the country and killed probably about one-third of the entire population. Almost certainly this was a virgin soil epidemic. Later, twenty-eight smallpox epidemics were recorded until 1206. Among these epidemics, there was a clear trend of progressive shortening of the interval between two epidemics: until the year 1000, smallpox visited Japan with the interval of twenty-four years on average, while between 1001 and 1206 the interval became thirteen years.4 (Table 1) By the Tokugawa Period or the early modern period in Japan, smallpox was firmly settled as an endemic disease.5 Statistics from a village show that the village experienced major outbreaks of smallpox about every ten years. (Figure 1) They also show that about ninety-five per cent of the deaths from smallpox were those who were under ten-years-of-age.
I bring this up for two reasons:
One: that a new disease into a population without immunity could kill a large percentage of the population, and
TWO: that as time goes on, with each epidemic, fewer die, until it essentially becomes a disease of childhood
The lessons for covid? Well, thanks to the omicron varient, the milder disease took over (omicron varients tend to stay in the upper airway, and not give those huge fluffy pneumonias we saw earlhy in the epidemic).
the death rate of covid, although terrible, did not kill a significant part of the population.
when discussing covid, I should add three:
That the early shut down might have helped, but since the young had natural immunity, the shut down of society that lasted two years was malpractice (or maybe a crime). Two weeks to flatten the curve, yes, but prolonged shut down made no sense.
Finally, if you read about the high mortality of small pox etc: remember there are a lot of scary diseases out there.
Monkey pox could result in a minor epidemic, but it is rarely fatal even in Africa and HIV postitive westerners whose immune system is lousy.
Indeed, despite the hysteria, the CDC types didn't even bother to shut down the rave parties where it was being spread, and although the white gay community was organized enough to tell each other to get the vaccine, the public health departments failed to reach out to high risk Hispanic and black communities,. So here too you can see that they either didn't take it seriously or were incompetent, or were stopped from doing what was necessary due to political correctness.
This is similar to the way the public authorities failed to stop all those "firey but peaceful" demonstrations: if this was a serious disease someone should have done an evaluation on those attending. This population study ignores that the counties where protesters gathered were not the same places these professional protesters came from, and also ignored that the huge numbers they cited as protesters was a fake number, since the same protesters probably attended several meetings. Instead, anyone concerned with this danger were silenced.
to see a good study, check out the one that was done later for the Sturgis motorcycle ralley which found little spread despite the hysteria of the linked CNN report (86 cases, four people were hospitalized, and one died_) probably because by then herd immunity had taken place.
sigh.
But anyway: Yes, stop the conspiracy theories about meetings planning for future epidemics: because such epidemics do happen.
But two: remove the nincompoops who mishandled the Covid response.
Finally, stopping people from using medicines that might stop them from dying was major malpractice, but hey Fauci did it in the past and got away with it:
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