Tambourine
Well-Known Member
But that's exactly what governments did when they initiated the lockdowns. They asked epidemiologists and statisticians to determine what would be needed to keep the numbers of dead and sick people at a level that would be manageable for domestic healthcare institutions.
Had the pandemic spread uncontrollably, it would have quickly overwhelmed healthcare systems throughout the world, causing far more deaths than just the disease alone would have.
This is what happened in Italy: Some hospitals became so overcrowded with diseased people that they could no longer provide necessary care to patients, and due to overcrowding the disease spread to previously non-infected patients as well.
In most countries, the point of the lockdowns was never to prevent the disease from spreading at all, it was to keep its spread and the number of infected people at a level that could be managed by existing infrastructure.
Many of these plagues became serious because people didn't take appropriate actions.
The Spanish flu initially spread rapidly through America in part because politicians were too afraid of the negative backlash of quarantine measures. And as more and more Americans became carriers, they carried that disease all over the world, which due to heavy wartime censorship was largely left in the dark about this pandemic until it was too late. The reason why it's called "Spanish" flu in the first place (even though it likely originated in the US) is because Spain was one of the few countries where the press was allowed to write freely about the disease.
On the other hand, some cities in medieval Europe were able to ride out the worst of the Bubonic plague by initiating Quarantines (the word actually comes from the Italian quarantena, a period of forty days that ship crews were required to isolate so they would not spread the disease). Of course, many would still be hit by the famines that were caused by the plague as well.
