Times of the Islands Spring 2021

Wear a mask, wash your hands,
socially distance, get vaccinated
The epidemiologists had warned us. The virologists told
us it was lethal, and we had no immunity. The modelers
predicted dire consequences. Front-line doctors and
nurses showed us overflowing hospital wards; refrigerator
trucks were parked out back. And Johns Hopkins kept
count: 2,000,000+ deaths worldwide. How could we let
this happen? Especially since this isn’t our first rodeo. In
fact, the first pandemic in the Americas may date to the
arrival of Christopher Columbus. More about Columbus
in a bit, but first back to R 0.
The density of a population is key to the speed of
disease spread. R 0 describes that spread if everyone is
immunologically naïve (totally susceptible) in the absence
of interventions (such as social distancing or mask use).
In a nutshell, R 0 is the average number of individuals that
a contagious individual will infect. Granted, not everyone
who is contagious will infect someone else, but there are
individuals whose physical response (excessive shedding
of the virus) or personal actions (ignoring sanitary behavior)
are “superspreaders,” who infect far more than their
allotted R 0 .
For COVID-19, the current pandemic apparently
began in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and first
appeared in New York in early 2020. Epidemiologists
estimate the R 0 for the original SARS-CoV-2 virus ranges
from 2 to 3 (meaning one individual will infect two to
three other individuals). In comparison, the new variants
that have emerged recently are 60% more contagious (R 0
= 3.2–4.8). Smallpox is estimated to have an R 0 = 3.5–
6, which means it is 1.75–2 times more infectious than
COVID-19 has been. Pandemic influenza, including the
1918 “Spanish flu” (R 0 = 1.8–3.6) is on par with COVID-19,
while seasonal flu is considerably lower (R 0 = 1.2–1.4). In
gallows humor, diseases spread because of density and
density: Population density—in particular how spatially
clustered susceptible people are and the “dense-ity” of
the population—or how much they bury their heads in the
sand in response to disease.
Wear a mask, wash your hands,
socially distance, get vaccinated
Back to Columbus, and the phenomenon known as the
Columbian Exchange—the transfer of plants, animals,
people (and diseases) between the Old and New Worlds.
In historian Alfred Crosby’s study of the Exchange, he
gave the name “virgin soil epidemics” to diseases in which
a population had no previous contact and are therefore
immunologically defenseless. In this regard, the politics
of disease, what David Jones has called “rationalizing epidemics,”
has been used both to blame the source (“China
virus”) and absolve those who transmit the disease by
blaming the victim (in this case the Native peoples of the
Americas) for lacking immunity and being genetically
naïve.
By this logic the fault did not lie with the Spanish
and other Europeans who came to the New World,
even though it was Old World diseases that caused the
demise of Indigenous societies. Indeed, accounts from
the British settlement of New England in the mid-1600s
clearly describe the horrific impact of European diseases,
especially smallpox, which decimated the Narragansett,
Massachusett, Wapanoag and other Indigenous communities.
The colonists’ sentiment was, “God hathe consumed
the natives with miraculous plague,” and “cleared our
title” to New England.
It is surprising that there are no similar descriptions
of Taíno mortality during the initial Spanish invasion.
Why not? Were pathogens, unwittingly transmitted by the
Spanish invaders, responsible for the rapid collapse of
Taíno society? Conversely, did pathogens transmitted by
the Taíno cause the death of numerous Spaniards in the
early years of Spanish settlement in the Caribbean? To
find the answers, we need to examine the different potential
diagnoses of the Columbian Exchange with respect to
disease symptoms and etiology.
The Columbian Exchange went both ways and sometimes
it was the colonizers who got sick. Historically, little
attention has been paid to dead Colonial Spaniards, yet
die they did and at alarming rates. Within a week of landing
at La Isabela, the first Spanish settlement in the New
World established on the north coast of the Dominican
Republic in 1493, at least one-third of the 1,200 men
Columbus brought with him on his second voyage fell
sick, half were incapacitated soon after, and an unspecified
number died. When newly appointed Governor
Nicolas Ovando replaced Columbus in Hispaniola in
1502, the 1,000 men he brought with him fell sick and
the majority died. Bartolomé de las Casas (the principal
eyewitness chronicler) blamed a new disease—syphilis—
but syphilis does not kill quickly, taking on average of
10–30 years from exposure to death. The culprit was certainly
not syphilis.
Wear a mask, wash your hands,
socially distance, get vaccinated
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