The Shortages May Be Worse Than the Disease

Every day, new evidence emerges of the havoc that COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is wreaking all around a thoroughly globalized world. As a new pathogen sweeps nations and continents, people are being quarantined in hospitals and aboard ships in distant ports, and the movement of labor and vital supplies has been profoundly disrupted. What’s becoming clear—from China to Iran to Italy to the United States—is that the new pathogen isn’t the only thing putting human life at risk. The shortages and other disruptions that an epidemic causes, not to mention the social inequities that it aggravates, massively amplify the consequences caused by the disease itself.

And yet these dynamics—far from being unique to the current epidemic—have recurred time and again for at least half a millennium. As a historian of slavery and medicine, I often come across bleak accounts of smallpox outbreaks that happened 200 to 500 years ago. Then as now, the poorest and least powerful people were usually at the greatest