Deja Vu’
It began innocently enough. A disease was spreading overseas and it was killing millions of people. Yet, everyone in America felt secure. These things don’t happen to us. After all, diseases don’t travel across oceans, so that was a problem for other countries to worry about.
Of course, we know that’s not how it turned out. Someone travelled overseas and brought the disease back home. It started with a few cases and quickly began to spread. The government reacted with it’s best advice it could give. They suggested social distancing. They suggested masks. They suggested that people should wash their hands more vigorously.
Unfortunately, some people refused to follow these guidelines. “I’m from ‘Murica” they said. “Nobody tells me what to do.” Others didn’t say those things but they thought they were healthy. Weak people died from that stuff. Old people died from that stuff.
Except, this virus attacked healthy people. Healthy people were vulnerable. Healthy people were the ones hit hardest. When all the dust had settled, 675,000 Americans had died. I’m sure many of you have caught onto the details of the story. This particularly tale involves the 1918 flu pandemic.
That one started in Europe while the current one started in Asia, but otherwise the stories are eerily similar. When we learned about the 1918 flu in history we just chalked it up to people not knowing any better. Medicine was not nearly as advanced and the public was not nearly as educated about disease prevention.
We’re smarter now. We know more about hygiene. We know more about medicine. We have more advanced hospitals that can treat these things. The current pandemic has claimed nearly 610,000 lives in the U.S. alone. Families have been irreparably torn apart.
What’s remarkable is that after 100 years, this story is not all that foreign to us. Millions of Americans could tell a story about someone from their family back then and could tell a similar story today. The opening paragraphs could just as easily describe the current pandemic.
No one would dare deny the Spanish flu. It has become an integral part of our U.S. History curriculum. There are numerous events we don’t cover that we absolutely should. That is not one of them. Anyone who’s family has been in the country for over 100 years probably has their own story to tell. It is impossible to get through history without telling those stories.
Yet, here we are. We still have people denying the virus. We still have people that shunned the suggestions about wearing masks, practicing social distancing, and improving personal hygiene. We still have people that distrust the government enough to deny all kinds of advice and rules.
The sad thing is that those people were not the ones most effected. Somehow you knew that would happen. So, we begin to take stock in what we’ve learned. First, we learn that there are parallels for almost everything in history. Sure, technology improves and knowledge comes with that, but history often repeats itself. Second, even though we discuss these things in history, there will always be those that don’t learn or don’t see the connection.
It seems impossible, but we are destined to pass the 675,000 mark. We are destined to do it because a group of Americans are too stubborn to admit they were wrong. You can hear them cry hoax all the way to their hospital beds and ventilator units. You can hear them cry hoax to their super spreader events. You can hear them cry hoax as they watch yet another loved one or family friend die.
You can also see a high school student 100 years from now learning about COVID. They will think to themselves that it was a shame how ignorant the people were back then. Why didn’t they learn from 1918? It might even be a history they are doomed to repeat themselves.
Good points, but a couple quibbles:
1a) the 1918 flu actually appears to have started not in Europe, but in Kansas. It was brought by U.S. soldiers to Europe, in a relatively minor form, where it mutated into the deadly so-called “Spanish flu” that came back to the States with soldiers returning from France. So “Spanish flu” is a historical misnomer; it more accurately could be called the “Kansas flu.”
b) not sure how fair it is to assume that we were taught about the 1918 flu in high school. I was edumacated in the ’60s, in a highly-rated public school system in a rather liberal Northeastern suburb, and I sure never heard about it in school.
But what about Freedumb. Damn commies.
2Fair points El Lagarto. I should have been more precise. I know we learned about in U.S. History and I remember teaching it, so it might be a more recent addition to the curriculum. My great grandmother died from the flu, so it’s a more personal history I’m familiar with. So, it might have been something I covered more in depth from personal experience.
Oddly enough, she was taking care of her brother who was a drunk and had contracted the flu. Somehow he survived and she did not despite the fact that she was healthier. The more things change the more they remain the same.
3I agree with el lagarto. I was in high school in the mid-sixties (graduated in ’65) and the “Spanish flu” was not a part of our curriculum. There was no mention of it in my family although my mother was born in 1919 and it surely must have been a concern. I don’t think even the big polio epidemics of the 1950’s were given any notice in our classes despite the fact they were fairly recent. (The boy across the street from us contracted it about a year before the vaccine was available. He spent many weeks in an iron lung, but survived.)
From the first time I read about this new illness in China that was attacking lungs and killing people, I knew we were in for it. In this day and age with the ease of travel between countries, it was only a matter of time before it came to our shores. We should have been better prepared instead of listening to the orange nitwit. His followers still refuse to believe it isn’t a hoax. Even while they’re dying from it.
4It didn’t have to be this bad. Never forget, Trump is directly responsible for many of the deaths and untold misery.
‘Sen. Sherrod Brown, ‘Trump dismantled our infectious disease infrastructure.’
5https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o7SffOCaxg
Well I am 66 graduated from HS in 72.
6I remember my grandmother talking about the flu, she knew people who died.
I am not sure in the 60’s and70’s they even knew that the flu started in Kansas.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/
My great-uncle fought in WWI, survived combat and the end of the war, and was waiting in France in 1919 for a ship home when he died of influenza.
I got the vaccine in December. I have not stopped wearing a mask in public in 18 months and I’m not going to stop any time soon.
This is not anywhere near over.
I am not fucking around with this shit.
7A family member bought a plot big enough to hold several generations of his family back in the 1890s. It’s now full of strangers who died in 1918. If you walk through an old cemetery, you’ll see so many markers from this period. It seems we’re waiting for Act II of the Covid Crisis whilst the MAGA’s laugh about “Owning The Libs” which they seem to be dying to do.
8According to John Berry’s book “The Great Influenza”, the 1918 flu was called the Spanish Flu because the newspapers in that country were the only ones mentioning a mysterious sickness that was killing numerous people. Wilson and Europe were rarely allowing newspapers to mention this disease as a cause of death because we were fighting WWI and they were hoping to keep the the Germans from knowing how many we were losing to this illness. If I recall correctly the Germans did not get severely crippled from this flu until approximately the middle of the war. Some historians think that the flu hitting the Germans so hard at that time helped us win the war.
Like some others on here, I also am a “child” of the 60s educational system. I do recall one sentence in our history text mentioning the 1918 flu. The sentence just casually mentioned it was happening about the same time as the war. Nothing else.
Also, like others here, my dad’s family lose a family member to 1918 flu: a baby who was a brother to my dad. Plus, if my memory recollection is correct, former president Gerald Ford lost a 5 year-old-brother to it. That is why he rushed a vaccine out so fast for the swine flu that was occurring in 1976.
Finally, another interesting book about the 1918 flu is Gina Kolata’s “Flu: the Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It.”
9My grandfather was drafted in 1918 but never went overseas. His whole army service was spent, he said, digging graves for other soldiers at a camp in Maryland.
Wilson’s response was not much better than trump’s because he was focused on the war; censorship kept much of the worst news out of the papers. But in 1918 no one had even seen a virus and antibiotics for secondary infections did not exist. In 2020 an effective vaccine was developed in a matter of months. We have ventilators; we have PPE. It should have been less terrible than it was/is.
10I hope you don’t mind that I go off on a slight tangent here a Nick. The responsibility for much of the COVID misinformation can be laid at the feet of Fox News and their announcers.
Shout out today to those Fox broadcasters for the plummet in stock market indices (due to a resurgence of COVID cases). I hope the highly paid COVID conspiracy peddlers over there click open their investment portfolios on a break and ask themselves, “is this really in my own best interest?”
Idiots.
11There used to be a law that you had to have a smallpox vaccination. That law wasn’t repealed until 1949 when it was determined that smallpox had been eradicated. Many people my age and older have had that vaccination.
12Plus, there’s this amusing anecdote from 1900:
The Bubonic Plague in… San Francisco
13https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtG_5YHaWms
Calculating impacts of pandemic requires recognition of some key differences.
First, the 675,000 deaths in 1918-1920 was among a population less than 1/3rd the present US population of about 335 million.
Second, the deaths were primarily among those 20-40 years old, tailing off on both sides of the age group. About 50% of COVID deaths are among those 75 years old and up.
Third, the disease was incredibly common. Some suggest up to 25% of the United States population and 20% of the worldwide population had symptoms.
And last, the deaths were much, much quicker. The onset of symptoms to death could be as quick as within hours, and nearly all who died died within a week. Among those who did NOT die, a return to “normal” could be as quick as three days.
14TexasTrailerParkTrash @4, and various others, I’m the same vintage and our history courses and family mentioned the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic, among many other things.
Polio was always lurking [some kinfolk caught it], until the Salk vaccine became available.
That was one BFD for everybody, the distribution of it was eagerly awaited. I still remember all of us assembling in the school auditorium and the nuns shepherding us through the line [lots of howling, a couple hundred grade and high schoolers in the small school].
Still can barely see my smallpox vac scar on my arm too.
Lots of other future vaccines came too late for us though. These anti-vaxxers are the dumbest sonuvabitches in the species.
.
Kate Dungan @8, the quicker the idiotic MAGAots die off the better.
.
RepubAnon @13, Didn’t watch but probably not funny.
15Down in the RGValley where I’m from, many nearly eradicated elsewhere diseases are still present at a low endemic level.
I’ve known people who caught some serious stuff [plague, leprosy, cholera, various dysenteries, etc.], had some bad stuff myself once in a while [like dengue/breakbone fever, worst stuff ever had].
I learned about the “Spanish” Flu from my aunt, who caught it as a young woman, got very sick, but survived. She emphasized how sick she got, and the little girl down the street who died. When COVID-19 arrived on our shores, her stories came to mind. All of my family got their vaccines as soon as they were available, and we’re still wearing masks indoors around other people. I hope, a hundred years from now, more people pay attention to the stories they remember the old folks telling, from both the 1918 flu and COVID, and take better care of themselves than so many of us have done.
16Grandma Ada, there’s a typo in your post. Smallpox wasn’t declared eradicated throughout the world until 1979. My kids still got smallpox vaccinations in the mid-70s.
17My father lived thru the 1918 Flu epidemic and fought in Europe in WWII. He always said combat was less frightening than the flu because the Army gave him a rifle to shoot at the enemy. There was no defense against the flu.
The vaccines are our ‘rifle’ to defend against COVID.
18RepubAnon @ 13, thanks for video!
19I am a child of the 60s and the child of a polio survivor…..there was NO doubt at all in our household, either now or when I was a kid, that we would take those medicines or vaccines that were available and not whine. We saw the consequences of polio in our house and when we went with my Mom to her weekly “iron lung” treatments. She completely recovered and lived a relatively healthy life to 87. The thing that stuck to me all these years was the idea of consequences of our behavior. Ya wear a mask, ya social distance, ya try to behave and the more likely consequence was that ya didn’t get sick and ya didn’t die. I try not to care about the anti-vaxxers and “not me” who are getting sick now as a result of their actions, but I get a tad cranky when I recognize how much of the consequence of their behavior will fall on EVERYONE and not just those who chose not to behave better. The costs of their care and hospitalization and care, the costs of continued disruption to life in general…which will affect ALL OF US us one way or another. The politicization of vaccine decisions make it even worse. Putting yourself, your family, your neighbors,…..at risk just so you can try to (falsely) invalidate the election of someone you don’t agree with……is just simply STRAIGHT UP STOOPID. Ok I feel better, it must be nap time
20I learned about the Spanish flu epidemic from a PBS documentary. And I’m starting to think that the damage done by Republican voter suppression laws might be mitigated by the virus cases among the unvaccinated who tend to be Trumpers.
21@Sandridge #15: You’re right, the video on the 1900s SF Bubonic isn’t mirth-provoking. However, the way San Francisco and California treated the plague was to:
* Blame the Chinese
* Deny anyone was infected
* Blame the doctors for creating a panic,
* Etc.
The “those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it” factor is quite gallows humor provoking.
22All I can say is if orange 45 had somehow slithered his way into the whitehouse again, we’d be well over 700,000 deaths now, moving towards a million. Repugnanticans are doing everything they can to get there without him in the WH.
23No question, this has become a political disease.
Interesting comments everyone. I’m a tail-end boomer but I don’t remember learning about the Spanish flu in high school either. However I studied WWI and the Russian revolution quite seriously in college and remain fascinated by that era as well as the buildup to WWII. That’s when I first learned about the Spanish flu but it was kinda just a side note, sorta oh yeah and this was also happening. Where that pandemic really made an impression on me was in the late 1990s. Friend and I went bluebonnet day tripping. We stopped at a small white wooden church. Which wasn’t open so we strolled through the old cemetery on the side. I love old headstones. Suddenly I realized that many of the death dates were all within weeks of each other in 1918 (might have been 1919, can’t quite remember). Babies, children, adults. And it hit me hard that it had to have been the Spanish flu. It was shocking and so sad. That many deaths in such a short time must have decimated the small congregation and community.
24Wonder what folks in a hundred years will think of this pandemic and that there people who deliberately refused to protect themselves against it even though reliable vaccines were available and free.
Thanks, embarrassed by my complete blank on learning anything about the Spanish flu. But love the comment & agree that this has become a political disease.
25I was born in 1942 to a 52year old father and a 40 year old mother. When the Spanish flu broke into a pandemic, my mother was growing up in south Louisiana and no one in her family caught it. Daddy was fighting in the trenches in France and while others did get sick, he miraculously did not.
26Here in Dallas, Texas, Mayor Lawther shut the entire city down against the wishes of his Public Health Officer and stopped the worst of it.
Back then there were three weapons against the Spanish flu . . . . social distancing, washing hands, and wearing masks. There are old photos of nurses in their long white dresses sitting at a table stitching stacks of masks.
There was a surge of cases in 1918 before it began to subside. Total killed here in the United States was 675,000 (counted) cases.
Some should also recall the polio epidemic and the sanitariums devoted to Sister Kinney’s treatment, the iron lungs, the paralysis,and the March of Dimes. My parents were so afraid that they wouldn’t let me out of the house and burned all of my toys that couldn’t be washed with bleach. Swimming pools closed,schools closed, other public places shut down. Then the first vaccines came out, and a lab mistake in one of the labs sickened 250,000 children and killed about a dozen. Parents hastened to forgive the mistake and the vaccine was fully distributed.
While that was going on, as I recall, we also saw homes with Quarantine signs posted for cases of scarlet fever.
Today, there are a couple of issues with the vaccines that do need to be aired by people who know their science and their epidemiology. One is that the FDA has not yet approved these current vaccines against covid-19. The second one is that being vaccinated is not actually the same as being immunized. A vaccine can help prevent a bad virus from making people really ill or killing them while immunization keeps people from catching the disease in the first place.
We still have lots to learn about this pandemic we are experiencing. Vaccines are a good thing. Masks must be worn for the foreseeable future whether people are vaccinated or not. We are not through with this virus yet,and it’s definitely not through with us.