Читать книгу American Environmental History - Группа авторов - Страница 52

It may seem strange to include a document from recent US experience in a chapter where so much of the material comes from centuries past. But the emergence in 2019 of a new virgin soil pandemic, COVID-19, raises important questions about how epidemics unfold in history. COVID-19, like many other pathogens, originated in an animal, probably a bat, and passed into an intermediate host, perhaps a pangolin, or scaly anteater. From there, it seems, it leapt into human beings, possibly through the sale and consumption of the animal in urban meat markets. The virus entered a human population with no experience of it, and therefore no antibodies to it. Exactly how deadly the virus is also remains a subject of some debate, in part because different peoples in different places seem to experience it in different ways. The racial disparities in COVID-19 death rates are depicted as ratios in Figure 2.1, which make it clear that white Americans have been far less likely to die of the disease than Hispanic/Latino or Black Americans. (Native Americans, too, have suffered higher death rates than white patients, although their experience is not recorded on this chart.)

Figure 2.1 COVID-19 death rates by age and race.

(Source: CDC data from 2/1/20–6/6/20 and 2018. Census population estimates for USA. Brookings.)

Note that it is impossible to explain these differences as the result of missing antibodies in one population or another. In modern America, white, Black, Latino, and Native Americans have about the same level of exposure to known disease pathogens, including COVID-19. What, then, makes Latino and Black people more likely to die from COVID? Medical specialists cite pre-existing health problems – diabetes, pulmonary ailments, and obesity among them – that stem from higher rates of poverty in minority communities. If higher poverty rates among minority peoples are a product of America’s racist past, then COVID-19 death rates are also, in part, artifacts of historic inequalities. Knowing this, how might we think about other virgin soil epidemics in the past? In recent years, historians and other scholars have begun to question the role of virgin soil epidemics in America’s colonial-era depopulation. Closer research (see Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (2015) edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Allen C. Swedlund. Tucson: University of Arizona Press) indicates that death rates from disease alone were not as high as once thought. Alfred Crosby himself has sought to modify some of his claims, and now says that death rates even from smallpox probably did not exceed 30 percent, and that deaths from virgin soil epidemics were increased by war, enslavement, and dispossession. How do such findings change our larger narrative of American history? If violence made virgin soil epidemics deadlier, what mix of biology and cultural choices – war, slavery, and so forth – created the world of colonial America?