Despite a century’s progress in science, 2020 is looking a lot like 1918.
In the years between two lethal pandemics, one the misnamedSpanish flu, the other COVID-19, the world learned about viruses, cured variousdiseases, made effective vaccines, developed instant communications and createdelaborate public-health networks.
Yet here we are again, face-masked to the max. And stillunable to crush an insidious yet avoidable infectious disease before hundredsof thousands die from it. As in 1918, people are again hearing hollowassurances at odds with the reality of hospitals and morgues filling up andbank accounts draining.
The ancient common sense of quarantining is back. So is quackery: Rub raw onions on your chest, they said in 1918. How about disinfectant in your veins now? mused President Donald Trump, drawing gasps instead of laughs over what he weakly tried to pass off as a joke.
In 1918, no one had a vaccine, treatment or cure for thegreat flu pandemic as it ravaged the world and killed more than 50 millionpeople. No one has any of that for the coronavirus, either.
Modern science quickly identified today’s new coronavirus,mapped its genetic code and developed a diagnostic test, tapping knowledge noone had in 1918. That has given people more of a fighting chance to stay out ofharm’s way, at least in countries that deployed tests quickly, which the U.S.Didn’t.
But the ways to avoid getting sick and what to do when sickare little changed. The failure of US presidents to take the threat seriouslyfrom the start also joins past to present.
Trump all but declared victory before infection took root inhis country and he’s delivered a stream of misinformation ever since. PresidentWoodrow Wilson’s principal failure was his silence.
Not once, historians say, did Wilson publicly speak about adisease that was killing Americans grotesquely and in huge numbers, even thoughhe contracted it himself and was never the same after. Wilson fixated onAmerica’s parallel fight in World War I like “a dog with a bone,” says John M.Barry, author of “The Great Influenza.”
The suspected ground zero of the Spanish flu ranges fromKansas to China. But it was clear to U.S. Officials even in 1918 that it didn’tstart in Spain. The pandemic took on Spain’s name only because its free pressambitiously reported the devastation in the disease’s early 1918 wave whilegovernment officials and a complicit press in countries at war — the US amongthem — played it down in a time of jingoism, censorship and denial.
Like COVID-19, the 1918 pandemic came from a respiratoryvirus that jumped from animals to people, was transmitted the same way, and hadsimilar pathology, Barry said by email. Social distancing, hand-washing andmasks were leading control measures then and now.
Medical advice from then also resonates today: “If you getit, stay at home, rest in bed, keep warm, drink hot drinks and stay quiet untilthe symptoms are past,” said Dr. John Dill Robertson, Chicago healthcommissioner in 1918.
“Then continue to be careful, for the greatest dangeris from pneumonia or some kindred disease after the influenza is gone.”
In the manner of the day, there just had to be a catchyrhyme in circulation, too: “Cover up each cough and sneeze. If you don’t you’llspread disease.” But there were also marked differences between the viruses of1918 and 2020. The Spanish flu was particularly dangerous to healthy peopleaged 20 to 40 — the prime generation of military service — paradoxicallybecause of their vibrant immune systems.
When such people got infected, their antibodies went afterthe virus like soldiers spilling from the trenches of Europe’s killing fields.
“The immune system was throwing every weapon it had at thevirus,” Barry said.
“The battlefield was the lung. The lung was beingdestroyed in that battle.” Young soldiers and sailors massed at military campsin the U.S., sailed for Europe on ships stuffed to the gunwales with humanity,fought side by side in the trenches and came home in victory to adoring crowds.
The toll was enormous, on them and the people they infected.The Spanish flu could just as easily have been called the U.S. Army or U.S.Navy flu instead. Or the German or British flu, for that matter.
Among those who died in the pandemic was Friedrich Trump,Donald Trump’s paternal grandfather. Among those who contracted it andrecovered were the wartime leaders of Britain and Germany as well as of theUnited States, British and Spanish kings and the future U.S. President,Franklin Roosevelt, when he was assistant Navy secretary.Butthe toll was heavier on average people and the poor, crowded in tenements,street cars and sweaty factories.