What can we learn about coronavirus from the Great Plague?

Shops, bars and restaurants were closed, travel was banned and residents put on lockdown. Britain 355 years ago was not so dissimilar to today, but what can the last catastrophic epidemic this country faced teach us about how to deal with coronavirus? Mick O’Hare travels back to 1665

Unlike today, in a world without modern medicine it was a case of survival of the fittest (Getty)

A disease with no cure, spreading rapidly throughout London and beyond, just as summer appears on the horizon. Coronavirus may scare the pants off many of us but being forced to stay home, eschew public gatherings and having to visit 10 supermarkets before you can pick up a bag of fusilli is trifling compared with what was happening in the capital 350 years ago.

In the sweltering summer of 1665, plague came to London. Then, as now, the city was England’s centre of what was a world pandemic. At its peak, in the month of September, it killed 8,000 Londoners every week – almost certainly an underestimate; many victims were simply not recorded. The official death toll was 68,596, but by the time of the Great Fire of London the following year, it had killed possibly as many as 100,000 (records are, for obvious reasons, sketchy or were destroyed in the blaze). This was around 20 per cent of the city’s population. And, unlike today, in a world without modern medicine it was survival of the fittest in a city where hygiene was virtually unknown. Tenements overflowed with humanity and the streets congested with untreated sewage, slops from butchers and general refuse thrown from homes along with the flies that fed on it all.

Bubonic plague wasn’t new to the city. In fact, the Great Plague, as the 1665 outbreak has become known, wasn’t even the worst London had experienced. The Black Death of 1348 killed around half of the city’s and Europe’s populations – the most devastating pandemic in human history – while further bouts of bubonic plague also wrought havoc. The 1563 outbreak killed a quarter of London’s population, and was followed by major epidemics in 1603, 1625 and 1636. But maybe 1665 is remembered because it was the last significant outbreak in England and was followed almost immediately by the Great Fire – two years that left a scar on the city’s consciousness. And in those days London’s population was around half a million – England’s next biggest city was Norwich with a population of only 30,000.