10 Amazing Facts About Pandemics, Infectious Diseases in History, and Why We Approach Covid-19 The Way We Do

1. Good news and Bad News: Throughout human history, nothing has killed more people than infectious disease. That's the bad news. However, even though diseases have ravaged civilizations for thousands of years, it is only relatively recently that epidemic outbreaks have pushed the scientific community to develop some of the most amazing advancements in this era of modern medicine. It wasn’t long ago that we truly began to understand germs and how diseases spread, which led to the invention of vaccines, antibiotics, and prevention programs. That's the good news! 
2. Vaccination coverage has improved greatly over the past decades, but globally 13.5 million children were not vaccinated in 2018. According to the CDC, vaccines are one of the most successful and cost-effective ways to prevent diseases and increased vaccine coverage has led to a major decline of diseases. However, there has ALWAYS been some resistance to vaccination. For example, anti-vaccination societies became especially vocal during the late nineteenth century. Many anti-vaccinators believed that vaccination was, as George Bernard Shaw put it, a “filthy piece of witchcraft” which did more harm than good. The debate over vaccination has continually forced governments to assess the rights of the individual against the rights of the community. Does an individual have the right to resist vaccination when his or her actions could put a community at risk? Increasingly, governments have said no. But, some wonder, "Does the government have the right to force citizens to undergo medical treatments against their will?" 
3. So how do vaccines work? The basic mechanism by which vaccines work is simple: Vaccines create immunity in an individual by introducing a weakened or killed form of the pathogen that make us ill – such as bacteria or viruses – or its toxins or one of its surface proteins. The vaccine induces acquired immunity so that when your body encounters the real disease-causing agent it is ready to mount a defense. 
4. What is "herd immunity?" There is a collective social benefit in a high vaccination coverage. For most diseases, the greater the proportion of people who are immunized, the better protected is everyone in the population as the disease transmission can be reduced or stopped.
5. Some of the most notable pandemics have been the plague of Justinian (which wiped out nearly half of the global population in the 6th century), Black Death (a massive 14th century plague), the Spanish Flu (which infected one in three people in the early 1900s), malaria, smallpox (which may have killed as many as 300 million people in the 20th century but is what led us to modern vaccination), AIDS, and the recent outbreaks in the 21st century including SARS, Ebola, and Zika. Covid-19 is the latest challenge. 
6. Although hundreds of years ago Buddhist monks tried drinking snake venom to confer immunity, it wasn’t until the discovery of variolation in the 1700s that major strides were made. Variolation, a.k.a. inoculation, is deliberately adding diseased tissue to punctured skin. Edward Jenner is considered the founder of vaccinology in the West in 1798, after he inoculated a boy with smallpox and observed him build immunity to smallpox which led to the first smallpox vaccine. What is smallpox? In 18th century Europe, 400,000 people died annually of smallpox, and one third of the survivors went blind, while most survivors were left with disfiguring scars. Smallpox was known as the “speckled monster.”
7. Although not the same as vaccines, one other recent breakthrough has been modern antibiotics to kill bacterial infections. Antibiotics cannot kill viruses because bacteria and viruses have different mechanisms and machinery to survive and replicate. The antibiotic has no “target” to attack in a virus. However, there are some antiviral medications.
8. The practice of quarantine began during the 14th century in an effort to protect European coastal cities from plague epidemics. In early America, governments made sporadic attempts to impose quarantine requirements. Continued outbreaks of yellow fever prompted Congress to pass federal quarantine legislation in 1878. Between 1970 and 2000, the CDC reduced the number of quarantine stations from 55 to 8. Since 2004, the CDC increased the number of quarantine stations to 20 due to concerns about post-9/11 bioterrorism and the 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, also known as SARS.
9. Under its delegated authority, the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine is empowered to detain, medically examine, or conditionally release individuals and wildlife suspected of carrying a communicable disease. 
10. Currently, the list of quarantinable diseases is contained in an Executive Order of the President and includes cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers(such as Marburg, Ebola, and Congo-Crimean), and severe acute respiratory syndromes. Many other illnesses of public health signficance, such as measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox, are not contained in the list of quarantinable illnesses, but continue to pose a health risk to the public.

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