Apollo’s Arrow summary

In April 2020, things didn't look good for Marilee Shapiro Asher. She was 107 years old, and she’d been diagnosed with COVID-19. Doctors said her chance of survival was less than 50 percent. However, despite the odds, she pulled through.

Amazingly, this wasn’t the first time Asher had beaten a big-time virus. Way back in 1918, over a century earlier, she’d survived the Spanish flu, a particularly deadly strain of influenza. The Spanish flu killed millions around the globe, making it the deadliest pandemic in modern memory.

Measles. Scarlet fever. Typhoid. Tuberculosis. Each of these diseases once claimed thousands of lives a year. Today, thanks to the discovery of medical treatments like penicillin, isoniazid, and chloramphenicol, they no longer do. So, thank you, pharmaceuticals!

But that’s not the whole story. If you examine the death rates of each of these diseases, you’ll find a curious pattern. The largest drops in yearly deaths occurred long before the introduction of any wonder drug. So if new medicines weren’t the original solution to these awful afflictions, what was?

Meet Wanda DeSelle, a 76-year-old nurse from California. When she died of COVID-19 in March 2020, her grieving family had to say goodbye via video chat. The risk of infection was too high to visit in person.

Meet Richard Levitan, a doctor from New Hampshire. During New York City’s outbreak, he traveled to Manhattan to help the overwhelmed hospitals. He’d planned to stay with his brother, but when he got there, his brother’s landlord wouldn’t let him enter the apartment. The landlord worried that he might be contagious.

Imagine this: You’re a well-off white-collar worker living in Manhattan. When COVID-19 comes to New York City, you simply pack your bags and head to a summer home up north. After all, you can work from anywhere. And, if you do happen to get sick, your health insurance will secure you the best care.

Now, here’s a different scenario: You’re a struggling janitor from Queens. When COVID-19 hits, you have a choice. Either keep going to work and risk getting coronavirus or try quarantining in your small apartment that you share with five other people, including your elderly grandparents. In other words, you can either risk getting sick or ensure that you go broke. 

In March 2020, Yale University canceled all in-person classes. The school’s undergraduates returned home to wait out the virus. However, one of them, an undergraduate named Liam Elkind, was not content to spend all day merely taking notes online. 

Instead, he and his friends decided to help those in need. Together, they set up Invisible Hands, an organization designed to deliver groceries and other supplies to elderly residents across Manhattan. Within four days, they had 1,200 volunteers. Within a month, they had 12,000.

Some may describe the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 as a momentous event of earth-shaking proportions. However, if you ask Thomas Lecocq, a seismologist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, it was quite the opposite.

You see, Lecocq’s lab contains sensitive seismological equipment capable of capturing every minute shake and tremor around the globe. However, in March 2020, as much of Europe went into lockdown, the instruments recorded a strange tranquility. The sudden drop in human activity was so dramatic it literally made the Earth stand stiller.

It’s the late 1880s, and the world is racked by yet another plague. It begins in the remote city of Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan, and spreads into Europe via newly built rail lines. Soon people are dying in St. Petersburg, then Berlin, then Paris and Lisbon. By the time it arrives in the USA, a quarter-million people are dead.

So, what happened to this vicious disease? How did the plague end? Well, it didn’t. At least, not really. Scientists suspect the pathogen behind the pestilence was OC43, a type of coronavirus. The name may not be familiar, but you’re probably already intimately acquainted with the virus. OC43 is still among us. Today, it causes a common cold.