I can find no news outlet reporting the fact claimed in the headline, that the person died less than 24 hours after showing symptoms.
What is reported, in this article and many others, is that the person arrived at the hospital and died there the same day. There is no mention in any article I have read that the symptoms began less than 24 hours before the death.
OJFord · 9m ago
This article kind of implies it:
> The victim was rushed to Flagstaff Medical Center, showing severe symptoms, and died the same day.
But sure, that doesn't rule out that the symptoms became severere, or that there weren't different lesser symptoms beforehand. It does make it sound like it was all pretty immediate though.
slicktux · 4h ago
I recall being on a road trip and was at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains; was getting ready to camp at a random camp site and noticed a sign warning or squirrels that carry bubonic plague via fleas…
Scary..
kulahan · 2h ago
It’s not usually very bad. My wife used to do epidemiology in Utah, and the four corner states have a few plague cases every year. Very easy to get from prairie dogs as well. Iirc, prairie dog colonies are separated based on which ones have the plague and which don’t.
atomicnumber3 · 1h ago
When you say it's easy to get from prairie dogs, how exactly does that happen? Is it like, you're camping, and a prairie dog gets into your tent? How exactly does that people get exposed to a prairie dog?
317070 · 1h ago
It's not the prairie dogs themselves, but the fleas on the dogs. The carriers for the plague are fleas.
ugh123 · 1h ago
> Iirc, prairie dog colonies are separated based on which ones have the plague and which don’t.
Do you mean 'naturally' by their own selection, or some external means?
afiori · 1h ago
I read it as someone keeps track of it for public safety
Lime disease has a similar relationship with predators that eat mice, so let's also keep an eye out for the owls and snakes.
RandomBacon · 2h ago
I knew someone (in the U.S.) who contracted the plague along with his wife. He survived but his wife did not.
According to him, about one person dies each year from it.
iJohnDoe · 1h ago
How did they get exposed?
fakedang · 1h ago
Fleas moving from rats to pets I presume.
Fire-Dragon-DoL · 1h ago
What improvements do we have to survive against the plague compared to in the past? I'm curious to understand the difference
LarsDu88 · 1h ago
Antibiotics. Yersenia pestis is a bacteria that can be killed by most antibiotics
Beijinger · 1h ago
I think the plague has not been an issue since it is very sensitive against penicillin. What is concerning is more the speed from diagnosis to death in this case.
carl_dr · 50m ago
Sadly, it could be as simple as the guy didn’t run up tens of thousands of dollars of healthcare, and left it too late to get treatment.
> Plague is a bacterial infection known for killing tens of millions in 14th century Europe. Today, it’s easily treated with antibiotics.
> The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats.
southernplaces7 · 4h ago
Nasty thing that. Bubonic plague became famous for killing nearly half the western world in the 14th century in just a few years, but for all its voracious destructiveness, the pneumonic variant left it in the dust in specific situations. I've read that in cities and towns where plague took on its pneumonic form instead of its bubonic variant, 80%+ of the local population would die in just days. In some cities struck by this, populations didn't recover until the 18th century.
southernplaces7 · 4h ago
I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale.
The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average social group, family or community, one would hear of only a very small minority of people having actually died. It was, comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of pure clinical impact.
Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so many years now completely erased from your personal world. All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
harryquach · 3h ago
This reinforces my belief that today is the best time in human history to live. Yes there is still pain and suffering but overall more humans live lives our ancestors could not begin to imagine.
spooky_deep · 42m ago
In some ways - particularly health and food security - definitely.
Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.
southernplaces7 · 24m ago
>Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.
I'm pretty sure that abysmal health options, food insecurity to the point of famine always being just a stone's throw or single bad season away, and grinding poverty all created plenty of stress. The vast majority of people at the time just had no IG Reels with which to vent about their crisis mode for posterity. I just can't imagine any random modern person's level of stress being somehow worse.
As for lack of direction. Life in those times for a vast majority had a simple direction: labor and toil intensely until you die of old age/disease in the same place you were born, rarely straying more than a few miles from those horizons. I'd call today's self-created "lack of direction" pretty preferable to that.
suzzer99 · 1h ago
And yet Americans have never been angrier.
davidw · 27m ago
Tom Nichols has a theory that people are actually just kind of bored.
Most of the men involved in this were pretty well off, for instance. Big trucks, nice houses.
Eh, people got pretty worked up in the ‘70’s. And WW2. And the Cold War. And WW1.
n3storm · 1h ago
Eventhoug JFK Jr
Waterluvian · 2h ago
And we know this. We can measure it and reason about it. But good times breeds weak people and we’re well into the phase of people no-longer grokking why vaccines, civil government, democracy, floodplain management, etc. need to exist.
This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
Beat me to the punch. That simplistic piece of fantasized trope needs to die as soon as possible.
overfeed · 2h ago
Same goes for preventative maintenance, handling technical debt or any action that keeps negative consequences at bay. It's a failure mode that's almost an inverse of loss-aversion; some people will start asking "Why are we investing in $ACTION, it seems unnecessary as nothing bad ever happens"
pixl97 · 1h ago
People don't understand why Chesterton's fence exists
MangoToupe · 1h ago
> But good times breeds weak people
Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always thrived.
deadbabe · 2h ago
You can’t fight it, you just endure, and one day you may die but hopefully others will carry on in a better world.
askonomm · 4h ago
You should write a book, if you haven't yet. I'd buy it. Love the way you convey emotion with words.
"The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. "
Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.
jameshart · 3h ago
Richard Preston, not Crichton.
Maybe you’re thinking of The Andromeda Strain?
literalAardvark · 2h ago
The Hot Zone was an awesome read. Highly recommended.
southernplaces7 · 3h ago
Now that was a wonderful compliment. Thank you.
hibikir · 2h ago
In the middle ages they understood quarantine, but the fact that the disease was carried by fleas made it worse: It'd break containment unless the arrival was by boat, and you didn't let anyone disembark.
So even when warned (and people were warned) often the people bringing the warnings could spread the disease anyway.
roywiggins · 2h ago
> I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale
The Black Death was so big that people struggled to comprehend it at the time, too.
southernplaces7 · 32m ago
Exactly that too. Coupled with them living in almost complete darkness about how or why diseases spread, it would have been exceptionally terrifying to behold in a way that a modern person in the middle of a pandemic wouldn't have to face in quite the same way.
hn_throwaway_99 · 1h ago
> Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth.
My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
southernplaces7 · 29m ago
I can imagine, though in the context you describe, the entire terrifying process would have been much slower-moving. Months maybe? I'm honestly curious.
literalAardvark · 2h ago
Everyone I know lost someone to COVID. I almost croaked twice to it.
Idk where that "small minority" is but it sounds like you might not value your friends very highly.
Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold.
sokoloff · 2h ago
The IFR (infection fatality rate: the chance of dying for an individual who contracted COVID) is under 1%.
That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.
literalAardvark · 2h ago
One could argue that the plague also has a low kill rate these days.
The IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.
sokoloff · 2h ago
What?! I know hundreds of people who have had it, and only one I know went to the hospital. Zero died. I’ve had it three times. Zero hospital visits. One was “bad cold”; one was “mild cold”; the last was “would have never known I had anything if not for a complete loss of smell, which made me test”.
Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
literalAardvark · 1h ago
Who said everyone? iirc untreated IFR is around 10%
sokoloff · 1h ago
You did: “IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.”
literalAardvark · 1h ago
Eh, ESL. I meant the ones who need it, obviously.
suzzer99 · 1h ago
I know a couple in Missouri who lost 5 family members between his and her side. All obese. I believe 4 of them died after the vaccine was available, but they refused to take it.
southernplaces7 · 34m ago
I'm sorry but you're way off base, or deliberately reacting to information that you perceive as having a political agenda that it actually doesn't have.
How I value my friends has nothing to do with the death toll and mortality rate I saw anecdotally, of nearly nobody I know dying from it out of hundreds of people of many ages that I knew at the time. Do you imagine that me valuing my friendships more or less somehow changes the clinical mortality stats for a carefully monitored virus? Really?
Also, COVID wasn't a light cold, but for many people, the vast majority in fact, its symptoms were moderate to mild and far from fatal. Again, this isn't politics of any kind talking, it's just the raw numbers from any reliable source you care to look at. IFR wasn't anywhere close to 10% by the way, as you say further down. Most people, by far, with COVID, were never hospitalized for it (that would have been impossible considering what percentage of the population eventually got it) and the IFR rate among them wasn't 10%. I'd truly love to see your source for that whopper.
Globally, in absolute averaged total, as far as any source I've seen indicates, COVID had/has an IFR that roughly breaks down as follows: This is from the National Institute of Health btw.
"For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups."
In any case, all of this deviates slightly from a more basic point there's simply no comparison between COVID and the Black Death, in no scenario or circumstance, and mentioning that is not denying that COVID could be dangerous. It's just a statement of obvious facts about how much, much more horrific one of those two pandemics was historically.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
I mean I know dozens of people who caught it and nobody died. Anecdotes don’t mean much.
literalAardvark · 2h ago
Everyone caught it by now, so you know more than that.
Doesn't mean it wasn't deadly during the initial wave.
tolerance · 43m ago
I was let down by the link to "plague" in the lede being internal. I don't know what I expected, because that's the norm.
At the very least, what I'd like to see from news sites is using a LLM to synthesize the most recent/relevant stories to generate some sort of blurb explaining the topic for a given page.
That is, if a human can't be bothered to do it themselves.
throw310822 · 5h ago
Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague.
mplewis9z · 4h ago
You do know that both pneumonic and bubonic are caused by the same bacterium, right? They’re just different transmission methods.
throw310822 · 4h ago
Indeed. I wrongly assumed it would be bubonic as it seems to be the most common form (and because it qualifies a bit the term "plague" which can be perceived as generic, I think).
lazide · 4h ago
Yes, many types of bacteria can cause ‘a plague’, but at least in the western world, only one was ‘The Plague’.
Probably anyway, there is some debate on that. But it’s pretty likely.
readthenotes1 · 4h ago
You left one variant off, apparently:
"Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected rodents. "
Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me fleas
marssaxman · 4h ago
Many years ago, I knew a family who named the three squirrels who regularly visited their back yard "Bubonic", "Pneumonic", and "Septicemic". The squirrels did not respond to these names, but the family sure did find it amusing to use them.
Waterluvian · 4h ago
Mnemonic Plague
People
Learn
About
Germs
Using
Epidemiology
isoprophlex · 3h ago
What a wonderful typo. Death by infected memories.
You might enjoy the movie Pontypool. I describe it as a zombie movie about linguistics.
littlestymaar · 4h ago
I genuinely don't understand why this comment is downvoted.
carterschonwald · 5h ago
Bubonic
mcv · 4h ago
According to the article, they're all the same plague, but it manifests differently based on which organs it hits.
Apparently there's a couple of cases every year, but I've got to say that amidst the return of measles and various other diseases, the cuts in healthcare, this is not a great look.
Waterluvian · 4h ago
Apparently it’s very easy to treat, if you can and do seek treatment. Which is why the annual deaths are usually rural regions.
ginko · 4h ago
From the article:
>Symptoms often begin within a week of infection and may include fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes, nausea and weakness.
If I had symptoms like that I think I'd just stay at home and not visit a doctor yet. Certainly not within 24 hours of them showing up.
jll29 · 3h ago
Mumps, a common kid's viral disease, has overlapping symptoms, so many people might follow a "let's wait and see" approach.
Also, medical practitioners may not immediately put on their bioharzard protection suite when someone walks in with swollen lymph nodes and nausea.
That's why it is important to take news of incidents and location of the occurrence into consideration, both as a patient and as medical staff.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Mumps is commonly vaccinated against when children are very young. It’s one of the Ms in the MMR vaccine.
asyx · 1h ago
It’s 2025 my guy. Can’t count on kids getting vaccinated anymore.
Canada obviously had only 1/10th the population. Your attempted connection to domestic policies is spurious.
Waterluvian · 2h ago
I think the statistical anomaly you point out is an incredibly worthwhile thing to explore. There’s something to understand there. But I’m not sure it directly supports or refutes any arguments about domestic policies, other than perhaps saying that domestic policy making does not have a 100% guaranteed desired effect.
There’s likely numerous other variables to explore.
rayiner · 1h ago
No, I’m agreeing that it’s not about domestic policies. That’s my point. OP tried to bring domestic cuts to Medicaid into the issue to make it sound like the measles cases in the U.S. have something to do with that domestic policy.
mcv · 34m ago
That's a misrepresentation. I did not claim that the cuts to medicaid caused the rise in measles; that would have been a silly claim, considering those cuts are being made right now, whereas the rise in measles is already ongoing.
I'm saying it's part of a pattern. The rise in measles, after it was practically eliminated, is obviously caused by the rise in anti-vax beliefs. And that plus the other factors I mentioned are part of a pattern of carelessness and misinformation around public health. All of it put together, these are extremely worrisome developments.
Animats · 4h ago
There's a vaccine, but it's old and not recommended for the general population.[1]
What is reported, in this article and many others, is that the person arrived at the hospital and died there the same day. There is no mention in any article I have read that the symptoms began less than 24 hours before the death.
> The victim was rushed to Flagstaff Medical Center, showing severe symptoms, and died the same day.
But sure, that doesn't rule out that the symptoms became severere, or that there weren't different lesser symptoms beforehand. It does make it sound like it was all pretty immediate though.
Do you mean 'naturally' by their own selection, or some external means?
Lime disease has a similar relationship with predators that eat mice, so let's also keep an eye out for the owls and snakes.
According to him, about one person dies each year from it.
> The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats.
The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average social group, family or community, one would hear of only a very small minority of people having actually died. It was, comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of pure clinical impact.
Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so many years now completely erased from your personal world. All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.
I'm pretty sure that abysmal health options, food insecurity to the point of famine always being just a stone's throw or single bad season away, and grinding poverty all created plenty of stress. The vast majority of people at the time just had no IG Reels with which to vent about their crisis mode for posterity. I just can't imagine any random modern person's level of stress being somehow worse.
As for lack of direction. Life in those times for a vast majority had a simple direction: labor and toil intensely until you die of old age/disease in the same place you were born, rarely straying more than a few miles from those horizons. I'd call today's self-created "lack of direction" pretty preferable to that.
Most of the men involved in this were pretty well off, for instance. Big trucks, nice houses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
Hardly oppressed people.
This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
This is a silly and regularly disproven trope.
For an extensive and approachable start: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always thrived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone
There's entire chapters of this:
"The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. "
Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.
Maybe you’re thinking of The Andromeda Strain?
So even when warned (and people were warned) often the people bringing the warnings could spread the disease anyway.
The Black Death was so big that people struggled to comprehend it at the time, too.
My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
Idk where that "small minority" is but it sounds like you might not value your friends very highly.
Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold.
That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.
The IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.
Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
How I value my friends has nothing to do with the death toll and mortality rate I saw anecdotally, of nearly nobody I know dying from it out of hundreds of people of many ages that I knew at the time. Do you imagine that me valuing my friendships more or less somehow changes the clinical mortality stats for a carefully monitored virus? Really?
Also, COVID wasn't a light cold, but for many people, the vast majority in fact, its symptoms were moderate to mild and far from fatal. Again, this isn't politics of any kind talking, it's just the raw numbers from any reliable source you care to look at. IFR wasn't anywhere close to 10% by the way, as you say further down. Most people, by far, with COVID, were never hospitalized for it (that would have been impossible considering what percentage of the population eventually got it) and the IFR rate among them wasn't 10%. I'd truly love to see your source for that whopper.
Globally, in absolute averaged total, as far as any source I've seen indicates, COVID had/has an IFR that roughly breaks down as follows: This is from the National Institute of Health btw.
"For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups."
In any case, all of this deviates slightly from a more basic point there's simply no comparison between COVID and the Black Death, in no scenario or circumstance, and mentioning that is not denying that COVID could be dangerous. It's just a statement of obvious facts about how much, much more horrific one of those two pandemics was historically.
Doesn't mean it wasn't deadly during the initial wave.
At the very least, what I'd like to see from news sites is using a LLM to synthesize the most recent/relevant stories to generate some sort of blurb explaining the topic for a given page.
That is, if a human can't be bothered to do it themselves.
Probably anyway, there is some debate on that. But it’s pretty likely.
"Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected rodents. "
Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me fleas
People
Learn
About
Germs
Using
Epidemiology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onzL0EM1pKY
Apparently there's a couple of cases every year, but I've got to say that amidst the return of measles and various other diseases, the cuts in healthcare, this is not a great look.
>Symptoms often begin within a week of infection and may include fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes, nausea and weakness.
If I had symptoms like that I think I'd just stay at home and not visit a doctor yet. Certainly not within 24 hours of them showing up.
Also, medical practitioners may not immediately put on their bioharzard protection suite when someone walks in with swollen lymph nodes and nausea.
That's why it is important to take news of incidents and location of the occurrence into consideration, both as a patient and as medical staff.
Canada obviously had only 1/10th the population. Your attempted connection to domestic policies is spurious.
There’s likely numerous other variables to explore.
I'm saying it's part of a pattern. The rise in measles, after it was practically eliminated, is obviously caused by the rise in anti-vax beliefs. And that plus the other factors I mentioned are part of a pattern of carelessness and misinformation around public health. All of it put together, these are extremely worrisome developments.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00041848.htm