Lazzari Gianrocco, Colavizza Giovanni, Bortoluzzi Fabio, Drago Davide, Erboso Andrea, Zugno Francesca, Kaplan Frédéric, Salathé Marcel
Digital Epidemiology Laboratory, School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2020 Oct 20;10(1):17849. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-74775-6.
The plague, an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is widely considered to be responsible for the most devastating and deadly pandemics in human history. Starting with the infamous Black Death, plague outbreaks are estimated to have killed around 100 million people over multiple centuries, with local mortality rates as high as 60%. However, detailed pictures of the disease dynamics of these outbreaks centuries ago remain scarce, mainly due to the lack of high-quality historical data in digital form. Here, we present an analysis of the 1630-1631 plague outbreak in the city of Venice, using newly collected daily death records. We identify the presence of a two-peak pattern, for which we present two possible explanations based on computational models of disease dynamics. Systematically digitized historical records like the ones presented here promise to enrich our understanding of historical phenomena of enduring importance. This work contributes to the recently renewed interdisciplinary foray into the epidemiological and societal impact of pre-modern epidemics.
鼠疫是一种由鼠疫耶尔森菌引起的传染病，被广泛认为是人类历史上最具毁灭性和致命性的大流行病的罪魁祸首。从臭名昭著的黑死病开始，据估计，在多个世纪里，鼠疫疫情已导致约1亿人死亡，局部死亡率高达60%。然而，由于缺乏数字化形式的高质量历史数据，几个世纪前这些疫情的疾病动态详细情况仍然很少见。在这里，我们利用新收集的每日死亡记录，对1630 - 1631年威尼斯市的鼠疫疫情进行了分析。我们确定了双峰模式的存在，并基于疾病动态计算模型提出了两种可能的解释。像这里展示的系统数字化历史记录有望丰富我们对具有持久重要性的历史现象的理解。这项工作为最近重新兴起的跨学科探索做出了贡献，该探索旨在研究前现代流行病的流行病学和社会影响。
