Having already treated social distancing, quarantine, crime, fake news, lack of preparation, fake remedies, and the inadequate facilities for the treatment of the sick and the disposition of the dead, the author now takes up another all-too-familiar effect of pandemic: what happens to a great metropolis when the wheels of commerce come to a full stop. Wanting to make his point with even more care than usual, he lists the rolls of the unemployed in several broad areas and describes the cascading effect the shutdown of one trade has on several others. Only a vigorous program of social relief, he asserts, prevented rioting and mass starvation. As part of this program, many of the unemployed were given jobs as watchmen at shut-up houses or as nurses tending victims of the plague. The author notes that, in a grim irony, the high death rate in these occupations actually reduced the burden on the remaining citizenry and the likelihood of widespread starvation.
He also takes up the inherent difficulty in accurately reporting cases of the disease and the number that died of it, only in this case the causes are largely from the high rate of mortality caused by the plague, which overwhelmed the capacity of the authorities to manage it, rather than from official misadministration.
[The way in which job losses in one trade result in a cascade of job losses in industries dependent upon them is reflected in our own time in the April 2020 unemployment figures: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/upshot/virus-jobless-rate-demand-collapse.html. See also https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:
Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.
Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.
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