> The Antonine plague would continue to rage in the cities and military camps of the Roman Empire for at least another decade. A second wave of an undiagnosed epidemic disease hit Rome in 190 AD; if this too was part of the Antonine plague, then the pandemic lasted at least a quarter-century.
What ended it? Decade or quarter century - how did it subside, and why?
Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years.
My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light.
What ended it? Decade or quarter century - how did it subside, and why?
Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years.
My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light.