Pandemics, population density and urbanisation
Comments on socialistresistance.org2020sTwo comments by Alan in the thread under “Covid-19: the ecological dimension” on socialistresistance.org.
The publication's own web text.
Editor's note. Posted under Alan's article Covid-19: the ecological dimension (April 2020). Philip Ward disputed its argument that population density and urbanisation drive the spread of a pandemic once a pathogen has crossed into humans: Wuhan's testing, contact tracing and isolation showed that spread can be controlled despite overcrowding, and in the past trade and the movement of people mattered more.
11 April 2020
Phil makes a fundamental mistake (in my view) when he dismisses population density/urbanisation as the driving force of such pandemics, along with globalisation. An article by David Harvey in Jacobin – Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19* – runs parallel to my piece on these points (paragraphs 4 and 5). Harvey also sees such pandemics as an integral part of the environmental crisis.
*https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-economy-disruptions
Editor's note. Campbell McGregor then pointed out that the world's population was around 300–400 million at the time of the Black Death and around 200 million at the Plague of Justinian, against 7.8 billion today, which “does cast doubt on whether there is a necessary connection between absolute population figures and pandemics”.
16 April 2020
Hi Campbell
In my view there is a clear (though uneven) connection between the size of the global population and the frequency of epidemics and pandemics. In general, the bigger the global population the greater the capacity for localised population density based on urbanisation – with serious (and increasing) implications for the ecology of the planet. (Ecology being the relationship between living organisms and between them and the environment itself).
Urbanisation and localised population density has existed since the emergence of cities following the decline of hunter-gathering era and the rise of agriculture around 12,000 years ago – which provided the material basis for a significant increase in the global population beyond the 10 million at the time. The city of Uruk founded in the 4th millennium BC, 50 miles south of modern Bagdad, was (according to the Ancient history encyclopaedia) the earliest example of urbanisation with a population of 80,000 living within an area of 2.3 square miles.
Campbell doubts whether population density could have been an issue at the time of the Black Death in Europe, with a global population of only 300-400 million. That is not true, however. Danial Defoe, in his classic A Journal of the Plague Year (in London) describes how the most densely populated parishes of London were hit hardest by the plague: “we perceiv’d (he says) the infection kept chiefly in the out-parishes, which being very populous, and fuller also of the poor, the distemper found more to prey upon than in the city...” (page 16)
Editor's note. Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year describes the London plague of 1665, not the Black Death of the 1340s.