Am I the only person to think there might be possible parallels between the plague in Europe of the 14th century in Europe and the present situation.
You recall this pestilence arrived in England in 1348, People began falling ill with swellings (buboes) and morbidity was typical within 4/5 days. The Plague had (probably) spread from Asia but erupted with fury in the Crimea when a besieging army decided to lob plague-death corpses from their own side over into the town (Feodosia). The defenders dropped the corpses in the sea and then took ship back to Europe, carrying the disease with them.
But this may have have only been the catalyst. This is because the Great Silk Road had already opened up Europe and Asia and opened up easy pathways for the Plague to spread (you could say globalisation in our own day has this potential also).
Rats carried the fleas, and the fleas carried the parasites. The flea or insect (X.cheopsis) however can also survive for a time travelling in a cargo or merchandise without need for a host.
Pneumonic plague broke out in Manchuria in 1921 where life expectancy was 1.8 days (quoted in Ziegler 'The Black Death').Bubonic plague is less infective than pneumonic plague, where bacilli are sprayed out everytime someone exhales.
More 'open' societies are more prone, no doubt, to these maladies and certainly disease is no respecter of borders.
But epidemiology is an extremely tricky subject and trying to work out what causes what, what the immune reaction is, wha treatment should be, can get very quickly into very deep areas.
Even today (600 years after the Plague!) there is a school that maintains it was the rat, or the interaction between the rat, flea and environment that is causal and not the flea per se.
So, scepticism - allied to prudent precautions - means that an epidemiologist must be an agnostic and not a true believer.