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Editor's Note: Joel Mokyr is Professor of the Robert H. Strotz Chairs of Art and Science and of Economics and History at Northwestern University. His most recent book is “A Culture of Growth,” published by Princeton University Press, in 2016. The Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences awarded him the Heineken Biennial Prize for his achievement in historical science, and the Balzan Prize for Economic History. The opinions expressed in this comment are yours. See more opinion at CNNE.COM/OPINION.
(CNN) - Humans are at war with a strange and hostile life form. And no, this is not "The war of the worlds", it is a war that we have been fighting since the beginning of history, and much earlier as well.
Human history can be described as an eternal struggle between people and microscopic pathogens, as author and historian William McNeill taught us a generation ago. We are dealing with a set of deadly, stubborn, and protein enemies. Some are viruses, some are bacteria, and some are parasites. Each is different in how we get sick and how we fight against them.
In 2020, the human race seems vulnerable. Global supply chains and travel cause outbreaks in one place to spread around the world in days, not decades as in the past. Our economy is a highly sophisticated machine that struggles to cope, in the short term, with disasters that few saw coming.
There is good reason to think that the economy will not fully recover until we have developed an effective vaccine, and then we increase its production to the hundreds of millions of doses we need in the United States, and billions worldwide. That could take many months, perhaps even a few years. The economic cost is nothing less than amazing and the social consequences could be chilling.
However, terrible as it may seem, given the death toll, from a long-standing perspective, if the covid-19 had to hit us, perhaps 2020 was the best time. At least we measure the duration of the devastation in months and not decades. In the past, we were not so lucky.
The bubonic plague appeared in Europe in 1347, killing approximately a third of the population and remaining there for centuries, and in Asia even longer. Infectious diseases wiped out much of the American continent's population after Europeans appeared. Smallpox devastated a huge portion of humanity for centuries before an effective vaccine was discovered in 1796.
Cholera terrorized many of the urban centers of the 19th century until its bearer was understood and defeated. He even still looks for (and sometimes finds) opportunities to raise his ugly head. Polio, the great fear of the 1930s and 1940s, took a long time to be conquered by the genius of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. Even with HIV-AIDS, now under control, it took 15 years from the time it was first recognized until it slowly began to fade in 1996.
People's war against malignant pathogens is not and never will be. But this will surprise many readers: the covid-19 is a rearguard action. In the 20th century, the percentage of people who died of infectious diseases decreased to a small fraction of what it had been in 1900 (in the US it plummeted from almost 800 to about 60 per 100,000 in 1996, which means a decrease of 92.5%).
A look at the mortality data - by cause - of the 20th century reveals two things. First, that mortality from infectious diseases has already declined sharply for a long time: the main causes of death in 1900 were infectious diseases, while in 2019, non-infectious causes dominated and contagious diseases were relegated. Second, infectious diseases did not completely disappear and were fatal in their temporary returns from 1918 (Spanish flu) and during the 1980s (HIV).
In the end, we will see that covid-19 joins smallpox, measles, cholera, tuberculosis and bubonic plague in the cemetery of defeated pathogens. Malaria is not there yet, but Bill and Melinda Gates are on the subject. Not all of these diseases have been completely eliminated. But when they reappear, it is usually due to humanity's unforced errors.
The reason is totally obvious: Unlike our ancestors, we know who the enemies are. Think of infectious diseases as a tenacious band of killers that never completely disappears, but becomes inactive, only to appear again and again, unexpectedly, with a different appearance.
For example, Zika, Ebola, and swine flu. They are consciousnessless organisms programmed by evolution to multiply rapidly and spread if they can: meaningless biology imposed on an integrated world. We cannot disappoint our protectors as we do, because no two pandemics are alike. The way it works is that we throw things at it that works for a while, then we need to recalibrate. But thanks to modern science, we are increasingly improving this recalibration. So while the war is endless, there is little doubt that humans are winning; we have knowledge, they have evolution. Bet on knowledge.
The scientific response to covid-19 has been incredibly fast. In a matter of weeks, scientists had sequenced their genome and are actively searching for its vulnerabilities.
It's a matter of (historically speaking) a short time until we find them. What's more, the covid-19 is serving as a "focusing device": suddenly scientists of many stripes are concentrating on one topic.
History is full of examples in which society “recognizes” an urgent problem and concentrates on solving it. As the eighteenth-century writer Dr. Samuel Johnson said memorably, "It depends on it, sir, when a man knows he will be hanged in a fortnight, he concentrates his mind wonderfully." One thinks of the urgent need for eighteenth-century sailors to determine length at sea, the Germans' pressing need for nitrogen on the eve of World War I, or the concentrated efforts made on the Manhattan Project.
The best and the brightest are thinking about fighting the covid-19: finding cheap and reliable tests and, in the end, the holy grail, a vaccine. As politicians quarrel and point to each other, researchers collaborate, compare, and communicate.
Scientists are bringing to the battlefield a set of weapons that would have stunned the minds of Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur: they have advanced molecular virology and immunology, computational genomics, gene editing technology, sophisticated epidemiological models, unprecedented tools for storing and Analyze huge databases and ultra-powerful microscopes to take a look at extremely small things.
His arsenal is still far from perfect and we are becoming painfully aware. But it's much better than they had while battling the deadly 1918 flu, which killed possibly 100 million people worldwide. Identification of the influenza virus as the immediate cause of that epidemic did not occur until the 1930s. Human coronaviruses were identified in the mid-1960s.
This is a difficult time for humanity on a global scale. Sadness is natural and inevitable. But we must bear in mind that the kind of economic world that we have built, based on knowledge and research, will point the power of its powerful artillery to this virus and, sooner rather than later, will also destroy it. Until the next one arrives.
coronavirus