How to survive the coming pandemic

Wretched, terrible, destructive year, the remnants of the people alone remain."

An infected aeroplane passenger could bring a pandemic across the world in less than 24 hours. Such is the speed and convenience of air travel. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimated that 4 billion passengers used aviation in 2017 alone.

It was the international disease gripped planet Earth during the Middle Ages. In just four years, from 1341 to 1351, the Black Death killed up to 200 million people in Europe, with the disease steadily advancing west across the Continent. As a fifteen-year-old, princess Joan of England was to be betrothed to Peter of Castile. As Joan of England disembarked at Bordeaux she ignored the warnings of Bordeaux’s mayor, Raymond de Bisquale that the Black Death had gripped Bordeaux.

The royal castle where the princess and her entourage had lodged were surrounded by hundreds of decomposing corpses of the pestilence. Those still in the Black Death's grip showed tell-tale signs of infection: buboes, often painful and swollen lymph nodes as large as chicken eggs under the armpits. Those sick people were coughing up blood, lying prostrate from the fatigue of struggling with the plague before collapsing and dying in the street.

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