-As the coronavirus pandemic has swept the world,
you've heard it time and time again --
this virus is a great equalizer.
We're all in the same boat.
-That's the thing about COVID-19.
It doesn't care about how rich you are, how famous you are.
It's the great equalizer.
-And while it's true that a virus doesn't care
about the contents of your 401(k)
when it's invading your cells, infectious diseases
across history have provided stark evidence
of the divide between rich and poor.
Erin Maglaque is a historian of 17th Century Italy --
a time when plague ravaged Italian cities,
including Florence,
which instituted a general quarantine.
Since people couldn't work while in quarantine,
Florence's nobility decided to feed the poor,
hoping that this would slow the spread of the disease.
-They fed them really well.
So, every day, they got bread and wine.
Kind of every other day, they would get meat and cheese, rice.
They even got, like, fresh salads
delivered to the door, firewood -- everything.
And that was because they thought that the poor
were particularly vulnerable to disease
if they were malnourished.
So they thought that, like, the poor's bad diet --
their bodies were, like,
more vulnerable, basically, to disease.
-These payments of food were not without controversy.
Some worried that giving food to the poor would make them lazy
and forget how to work.
-And one of the arguments was if we lock down
the city for this long,
if we implement the general quarantine,
then the poor will lose the desire to work.
They'll become used to -- yeah, to being locked down,
to being provided for by the state.
-The idea that government support during a quarantine
would make people forget how to work
has echoes to our own pandemic.
So does the fact that there seem to be different rules
during quarantine for the wealthy residents of Florence.
-And if you were wealthy in Florence during the plague,
you were more likely to be given a pass
to walk around the city streets,
so you were probably less likely to be fully quarantined.
Like, there were still some, like, noble weddings
that happened.
One, you know, noble family still had their palazzo
painted by a famous painter.
I suppose there's also a chance
that you could have fled the city
to head to a country estate or a country villa,
which, again, is a kind of uncanny parallel
with our situation today.
-It was a similar story later that century.
In the 1660s, when plague ravaged London,
the diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about the eeriness
of quiet London streets --
quiet except for the rattle of death carts, that is.
In 1665, Pepys wrote,
"I find all the town almost going out of town,
the coaches and wagons being all full of people
going into the country."
Those people were the nobility of London,
who had the means to escape the city.
Meanwhile, the poor left behind lived in crowded
and unsanitary conditions.
Neil Cummins is a historian of economic history
and plague mortality in 17th-Century London.
He's one of the authors of a paper
which found excess rates of death
were lower in the wealthier parishes of London
during the 1660s plague.
-You can see that the rich know what to do
when plague outbreaks.
They get out of the city, and they do.
So you see kind of interesting patterns in the data.
Like in the British royal family,
they do not die of plague after 1500, after 1600.
It just doesn't happen.
They know what to do -- get away from people,
go to the countryside, self-isolate.
-It may seem obvious that rich people would die
less than poor people in the 1660s,
but it was actually an unusual situation
brought about by plague.
-You're seeing this very interesting social gradient
in the effect of epidemic outbreaks like plague
on your chance of survival,
and it's very interesting as to why that's happening,
because this doesn't happen in ordinary times.
In ordinary times, the rich are actually, peculiarly enough,
not necessarily living much longer than the poor.
And it turns out that if you look at the amount of booze
that they were imbibing, that it was just ridiculous,
and just their patterns of alcohol consumption
is one possible kind of explanation here.
-So while rich people could flee the city
to get wasted in the countryside,
very needy people had to stay and work.
And when they died, they were replaced
by members of their own family.
-There's a mobile poor of very needy poor
that are constantly flooding into the city.
And when plague takes away 25% or predominantly the poor
of London, immediately, their brothers, cousins,
sisters from the countryside immediately take their place.
-Nowadays, as countries around the world look for ways
to get back to work,
one idea floated has been the immunity passport --
a document showing that you have already recovered from COVID-19.
But this idea also has a pretty grim history.
In the mid-1800s,
22 yellow fever epidemics swept through New Orleans.
About half of those who were infected died from the disease,
but if you did survive, you would be immune for life.
At the time, they called this being acclimated to the region.
According to the Stanford historian Kathryn Olivarius,
this gave rise to a system of immunoprivileged.
Whether or not you were acclimated affected
whether you could get a job, who you could marry,
whether you could get a line of credit,
and where you could live.
And yellow fever was an ugly disease.
-But those who die, they died very horribly.
Victims experienced this sort of sudden onset of chills
and nausea and muscle pain, and suddenly, they would be --
some people would lapse into delirium.
Some people would be screaming in pain.
You would bleed through your orifices -- external orifices.
Then, very famously, you would vomit up this sort of thick,
black blood that looked a lot like coffee grounds.
-Yellow fever heightened the divisions
between the rich and poor and along race and gender lines.
Enslaved black people were considered more valuable
to their owners if they were immune.
Wealthy white people could isolate themselves
from the disease and saw their good health
as evidence of their strong moral character.
-If you were rich, you could leave town
and head to their countryside plantations
and become a so called truant was what they called it.
So they're effectively socially- distancing themselves from --
you know, putting physical space
between them and this diseased city.
So if you're rich, you can do that.
If you're poor or if you were not free, if you were enslaved,
you did not have a choice whether you can come or go.
-New arrivals to New Orleans would deliberately infect
themselves with yellow fever to try and gain immunity.
They did this by jumping into the beds of people
who had just died of yellow fever
or even injecting themselves with infected blood.
If you were poor and needed to work,
you didn't have much of a choice.
You had to get sick to get acclimated.
-I think one of the things that's been most impressive
and scariest to me about the sort of comparison
between antebellum New Orleans and today with COVID-19,
which is that then the language is very clearly --
in the antebellum South, it was very clearly --
the language about health was that it's your responsibility.
It's your choice.
You don't have to be here, but if you want to, you know,
make it in New Orleans, you have to get acclimated.
But that's your choice.
I think we're seeing this language of choice now, too,
which is scary,
because, you know, in this logic,
it means that, you know, if you want to be
able to feed your family and survive
and participate socially,
you have to take on this disease.
You should be able to sort of be a man and go out and, you know,
be a patriot, get your economy back up and going.
And this is not real choice, again.
It's not a choice to say,
"You can either, you know, risk this disease,
and you can keep your job, or else you suffer,
you know, terrible social and economic consequences."
That's not a real choice.
-With COVID-19 today, as with Europe
in the 17th Century
and New Orleans in the 19th Century,
not everyone has the choice to protect their health
by escaping a hot spot.
And while it may feel good to say we're all in the same boat,
that doesn't make it true.
And as history shows us, it never has.