What Makes Viruses Like COVID-19 Such a Risk for Human Beings? The Answer Goes Back Thousands of Years.

What Makes Viruses Like COVID-19 Such a Risk for Human Beings? The Answer Goes Back Thousands of Years.

The Faroe Islands are little volcanic spits of land poking out of the far north Atlantic Ocean. On the outer edges of Europe, they are isolated and cold; in 1846 they were one of the healthiest places on earth. But in that year, a carpenter, a native of the island, returned from Copenhagen with a bad cough. He had the measles. The virus had been absent from the Faroe Islands for more than 60 years, and, in the days before a measles vaccine, few of the island’s residents had immunity to the disease. Over the course of the next five months, 6,100 of the island’s 7,900 inhabitants fell ill. Over a hundred died.

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