Results reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment [1] submitted to HN [2]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02964-0

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46151324

The causal relationship here is murky. If have a hard time believing that a change in Italian shipping in 1345 was the only thing that allowed the bubonic plague to enter the otherwise hermetically sealed Europe.

The reason for the plague was disastrous health and cleanliness standards.

While most folks have probably heard of "the" Renaissance:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Renaissance

it was not the first in history:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_centur...

There's a certain 'critical mass' of people and thinkers, as well as decent enough communications (roads, letters) to allow for collaboration, needed to achieve a flowering/growth of knowledge, and that was cut off by (amongst other things) the Black Death:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_late_Middle_Ages

This is the sort of headline you get when academic research must function as click bait.

There are very few X caused Y statements one can make about historical events in good faith or with good cause.

Long ago when the History Channel was still about History, they did a hypothetical “What if the 10 plagues of Egypt actually happened?” That was surprisingly plausible. I’m getting some vibes of that.

The punchline of that hypothetical was that the hail and the locusts lead to wet grain being pulled into storehouses. A fungus that locusts can carry that is poisonous mouldered in the storehouses. The cultural tradition of giving the firstborn son a double helping may have reached fatal levels of exposure to the toxin, killing enough children to become a myth.

So the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011 could've caused covid?