Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 10

IN THIS CHAPTER

Pondering how the past shaped the present

Thinking about humankind’s remarkable journey

Tracing a tapestry of historical threads

Just two decades into the 21st century, humanity hit a speed bump, in the form of a pandemic. The pandemic was a new viral disease — relatively benign in many patients but deadly in others and wildly unpredictable. Because it was new to our species, nobody had a ready immune response. Highly contagious, it spread rapidly around the world. Immunologists, the scientists who are experts at these things, had to figure out how to fight the disease on the fly.

The World Health Organization called the virus SARS-CoV-2, for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, version 2 (after a predecessor in 2003). It called the sickness COVID-19, for coronavirus disease 2019, the year it was identified.

The nature of the threat and how it should be dealt with sparked worldwide debate. Some governments took quick, decisive action to contain it, while others decided to go more slowly. The latter approach proved to be ineffective as infection rates soared.

Another point of discussion was why the world was caught unprepared. “Public health experts have predicted we’d be hit by another pandemic for decades,” puffed the pundits. “Why didn’t leadership have a plan?” asked the journalists. “Why the heck didn’t anybody see this coming?” queried podcasters. “It’s all a hoax!” screamed too many conspiracy theorists.

The pandemic changed the world. According to Johns Hopkins University, it killed more than 4 million people worldwide by the middle of 2021, with case rates rising again. It stalled the world economy and influenced the way people did their jobs, as well as where and how they chose to live.

But this book isn’t about a 21st-century pandemic any more than it’s about the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe and Asia in the 14th century. It isn’t about modern epidemiology or economics, either. It’s about two broader questions: “How did things get to be like this?” and “Why is the world as it is?”

There have been too many years of human activity on this planet — too many lives lived, too many diseases, technological breakthroughs, migrations, wars, murders, weddings, coronations, revolutions, recessions, natural disasters, and financial meltdowns — to trace humanity’s route simply. Too many historians have interpreted events in too many contradictory ways. But what I hope you find in this book is a general view of how human history has gotten you and the world you live in to current reality. To this. To now.