The 1918 Pandemic Lasted 3 Years, Only One Way to End COVID-19 Earlier

a young man walks into a hospital in San Francisco circa 1918 he's just got back from the trenches in Europe and he's excited to see his family again his mother has sent him to the hospital because of his constant fever and fatigue she kisses him on the cheek as he leaves but little does she know that in just a matter of a few hours his skin will turn blue he will bleed from his eyes and ears and in the dark hours of the morning as he remembers his friends suffocating on chlorine gas and Belgium his lungs will fill with fluid and he'll drown cold and alone on the floor of a San Francisco Hospital today's topic will cover a specific viral outbreak what measures do we take to slow its advance what did we fail to implement the best thing we can do in any outbreak is to limit our contact with others and practice good hygiene and with that out of the way let's get into it the Spanish influenza or Spanish flu according to many historians was the worst pandemic in world history comparable even to the Black Plague in total deaths the Spanish flu came across the land in three waves the first in the spring of 1918 was considered pretty mild and was limited in scale the second wave began in August of the same year mutating into a more deadly strain and spreading to a global level we saw the third wave in the beginning of 1919 but it was contained in a handful of regions now many attribute anywhere from 50 million to a hundred million deaths to the Spanish flu a hundred million is an enormous amount of people consider that the total casualties from the Great War sits around 40 million and that was a catastrophic number of people then is the Spanish flu still the worst pandemic in history the plague killed around 50 percent of the Eurasian population in a four year period with total death estimates sitting around 75 to 200 million the equivalent today of the entire population of the UK Germany and France combined suffice it to say a mythical amount of people died from Black Plague death isn't everything though the Spanish influenza pandemic is more relevant to us today than the Black Death germ theory was developed in the late 19th century and our method of treatment for the sick were a little bit more advanced in 1918 as they were in 1347 we no longer believed illness is spread by evil spirits or bad smells are you know too much blood in our bodies it seems obvious in retrospect that the influenza pandemic is nothing to scoff at but with all global crises the question is did we respond quick enough strong enough will future humans look back at us with disdain or will they applaud us for our quick action author and historian John Berry wrote that the US government used the same strategy for communicating about the disease that it had developed to disseminate war news that is an executive order to control all government communication strategy during the war that was premised on keeping up morale well according to berry keeping up morale meant that the US government primarily lied covered up the truth and misinformed people the stance of the American government can be seen through the words of Chicago's Director of Public Health worry kills more than the disease now that might be true in some cases but the US military was very keen on keeping people at work it's hard to fight when factory workers at home aren't manufacturing weaponry because they're all dying of disease so containment was limited to information not the illness this disinformation campaign resulted in almost the complete opposite of what they had intended Barry writes that absenteeism reached extraordinary levels it crippled the railroad system shut down telephone exchanges grocers refused to open coal sellers closed to the point that the Red Cross reported that people were starving to death not for lack of food but because the well were too panic-stricken to bring food to the sick journalists skipped days Ardenne writes that the most critical lesson from the Spanish flu era is that the government and society can never be sufficiently prepared for a pandemic without the information ordinary people needed to keep themselves safe trust between citizens broke down and even when the corrected information was provided citizens couldn't trust what they were being told which made it even harder to implement important public health measures Desjardin tells of a dr. Milton Rosen now who took all the precautions so familiar today testing quarantine medication and identification of anyone who'd had contact with those infected but math overwhelmed science and cases multiplied faster than doctors could stop them soon every Massachusetts Hospital was closed by overcrowding public gatherings were canceled and Undertaker's ran out of caskets the sad truth of the matter is that sometimes governments won't prioritize the right things the reason that this illness was even called the Spanish influenza is that Spain was a neutral party during the Great War and did not have the same censorship laws that the other participating countries had despite the fact that there was no consensus on where the illness originated Spain was blamed for the flu at the time simply because it was the only country willing and able to report on it even today historians debate where the Spanish flu could have come from some point to a training camp in a tablet France some to a military base in Kansas and others blame Chinese migrant workers on route to Canada knowing where a disease comes from is important because it helps us contain it and measure its efficacy but determining how deadly a pathogen can be is difficult because we often don't know the real statistics until much much later so we need to be very careful about when and where we get our information the CFR or case fatality rate is important to know but it doesn't actually tell us that much about how dangerous a pathogen is what made the 1918 pandemic uniquely dangerous was that it affected people in their late 20s significantly more than any other age group Elaine GaN young our professor with the University to Quebec Amon rial found that the yearly ages at death during the fall wave of the 1918 pandemic in various locations in Canada and the USA report a peak at the exact age of 28 he argues that individuals exposed at least once to the 1889 290 Russian influence the pandemic strain had abnormal fatal immune responses to the 1918 outbreak exposure to a different influenza strain in infancy created a crack in the defense of many young people who when exposed to a secondary deadly influenza strain almost 30 years later could not generate the right immune response suffered from a secondary infection and died now the CFR of the Spanish flu was around 2.5 percent so how does the 1918 flu pandemic measure up against other epidemics the 1957 flu pandemic the 2009 h1n1 outbreak and the seasonal flu strains all have CFR is lower than 1% SARS had a CFR of 10 percent MERS was 30 percent Ebola has currently a CF ro 50% by and by the flu of 1918 was the worst flu pandemic in history but it is by far not the most deadly pathogen out there of course I'd be missing an opportunity if I didn't bring up the world's current situation ghovat 19 has a CFR of approximately 5.1 percent as of the beginning of April it appears as though tis twice as deadly as the 1918 Spanish influenza but Cova 19's global fatality rate is still in flux many factors can cause a CF r to vary from one country to another things like health care funding population density infrastructure media coverage and government action all change from nation to nation so a global fatality rate doesn't tell us as much as we want it to for example Canada sits at a low one point seventeen percent the United States at two point 16 percent China at four point zero six percent the UK at seven point 98 percent and Italy with the highest at eleven point seventy five percent those numbers sound scary huh but try not to get too alarmed by them the problem with calculating a CF are in the early stages of an epidemic is that it's difficult to record the number of total cases accurately not every case of kovat 19 has been accounted for we don't have consistent access to testing and we cannot test every one many cases are flying under the radar these are figures that was categorically shift the CFR significantly possibly making it much lower than currently estimated so these numbers really don't account for everything by contrasting the Spanish flu pandemic to kovat 19 you're comparing century-old data with incomplete data and that sounds a little silly doesn't it we are currently in the grip of a new pandemic and the good news is that measures that many countries let slip to the wayside in 1918 have already been implemented today we also have a much more robust health care system and a better understanding of the human body diseases in science in general there is something to be said of our global community though we may not have hundreds of thousands of soldiers returning home from disease ridden trenches but we do have a global tourism industry we are learning more and more how connected we are to the rest of the world not only through politics and trade but through our health as well we are all one community and shifting blame does nothing to protect ourselves or the people we love we just have to do our 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Keywords: flu, spanish flu, influenza, plague, 1918 flu, 1918 spanish flu, 1918 pandemic, pandemic, the plague, black death, modern black plague, spanish flu origin, 1918 influenza pandemic, 1918 spanish flu pandemic, COVID-19, COVID 19, covid19, Pandemic Comparison, coronavirus pandemic, covid-19 virus, coronavirus, covid-19 pandemic

Id: eQJteHRyclI

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020