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Where the wealthy go in epidemics, then and now

Research shows that as the pandemic hit, those fleeing New York and London were white, educated and rich — we are certainly not all in it together, says KEITH FLETT

CHOLERA was the big and recurring disease of the 19th century. There was no full understanding of its cause and why it was spread until the 1880s.

Britain, along with the rest of Europe, saw several significant epidemics in 1831-2 and in 1848-9, in both cases also periods of revolutionary political changes.

The disease was held to be one of the lower classes, as indeed it mainly was, because of the insanitary housing conditions they had little choice but to live in.

On that basis the wealthy had little to worry about, but that didn’t stop them taking precautions.

Asa Briggs, a leading post-1945 social historian, published one of the first studies of the impact cholera had on society where he touched on this issue in the journal “Past and Present.”

He noted the “flight of the rich when cholera threatened…. The rich were sometimes accompanied by the representatives of authority. The prefect was conveniently away from Marseille in 1835 — for example — with an attack of gout. Bishop Phillpotts, the target of the reformers of Exeter, was away in Torquay during the terrible Exeter outbreak. The Viceroy of Alexandria was absent on his boat for ‘a few days of rest’ during the 1865 Egyptian outbreak.”

I’m not sure much has changed...

A short BBC documentary in April reported on US demand for bunkers where the rich can hide – not from the coronavirus but from a breakdown of social order. In Britain this translates into increased interest in Scottish castles and remote islands.

There is better data available for where the rich have gone during the Covid-19 crisis for the US, however.

Academic Adam Tooze tweeted that about 5 per cent of New York City’s population – around 420,000 people – left the city as Covid-19 hit, overwhelmingly from wealthiest neighbourhoods of NYC Upper East Side, the West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights, where the population fell by 40 per cent or more.

Another US academic, Kim Phillips-Fein who has researched how New York changed during the mid-1970s oil-related financial crisis, argues that “There is a way that these crises fall with a different weight on people based on social class…Even though there’s a strong rhetoric of ‘We’re all in it together,’ that’s not really the case.”

New York Times journalist Kevin Quealy has reported that the people who left New York as Covid-19 hit are “mostly white in a city that’s mostly not.

“Residents from these places are more than twice as likely to have a college degree. These places have higher rents and lower poverty rates. People who live there are more likely to be able to walk or bike to work, or to work from home.”

What information there is from Britain comes in part from Oxford University figures that suggest around 250,000 people left London as the virus appeared in March but before lockdown. They headed to the east of England and the south-east.

More recently a survey from the centrist Resolution Foundation has found that while 83 per cent of the highest earners are currently working from home only 44 per cent of the lowest earners are.

Where might these high earning homes be? Right-wing historian Niall Ferguson writing in the Sunday Times on May 17 argued that most were outside of the city in comfortable rural locations – as he is himself – and may well stay there for a while yet.

Meanwhile essential workers, often poor, remain to do the work of keeping society going in the city where transmission rates of Covid-19 have been higher. How a crisis affects people depends on class in 2020 just as it did in the 1830s and 1840s.

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