Hindsight is 2020
(or History Ignored is History Repeated)
As the novel coronavirus of 2020 took hold of our economy and caused grave health concerns early in the winter of 2020, a group of three-dozen networking colleagues learned to go from meeting in person for breakfast once a week to navigating their meetings online via ZOOM to implement “social distancing” as a way to prevent infecting themselves and others.
Always interested in history, I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a small survey of members and a few other individuals about the impact of the coronavirus on businesses (as many were small business owners). I sent out a survey questionnaire and asked each person responding to let me know their answers. This was done in June of 2020. I let the members of my BNI chapter know the results and watched at each meeting as people were adjusting to this new life. (Complete stats at the end of this blog.) Most have been able to continue working, even the “non-essential” workers. One had to lay-off staff as I myself had also received a long-term lay-off, and one owner who works with people as a massage therapist, had to shut down her business until such “non-essential” workers were given the go-ahead by the state government. Many members applied for small business loans and received the help of another member who is a commercial banking officer. Some members found their businesses were doing well despite the virus, especially as many people were staying at home and becoming more aware of their surroundings.
It’s understandable that everyone has been anxiously waiting to hear that the number of virus cases were going down, hoping that life could get back to “normal” but the statistics for this coronavirus started to grow as more businesses re-opened and spring break college students congregated at beaches around the country. Then the perfect storm happened when protests exploded around the country over exposed video of an arrest in Minneapolis, which compounded all the other dire news for our nation. Having more time to myself at home, I wondered about the past.
My curiosity about how the public reacted to the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic led me to do some research on this subject. Were we just repeating history? I only heard of one person who was alive at this time and could remember impressions of the pandemic as a small child. As it turns out, the 1918 pandemic is also considered the ‘forgotten pandemic.’
Researchers and historians writing about the Spanish Flu, which took place just over 100 years ago, have noted that very few people wanted to talk about it or preserve their memories of it, so it became known as “America’s forgotten pandemic.” This is one of the most important points I like to make about having a written history—if the experiences you go through are not preserved, then future generations of your family or the public in this case, would be unaware of what actually happened on a personal level. We just become a statistic in historical records. How can anyone or future citizens learn from our mistakes?
First, some basic facts about the 1918 pandemic. It occurred as the United States was getting into World War I, so that became the focus of the country. Many people today believe it must have originated in Spain, since it was dubbed the “Spanish Flu” but the truth of the matter is that the Spanish papers were writing about it while the rest of the world focused on the war effort. Spain declared neutrality during this time and had no reason to stay quiet about the flu. Britain, France and the United States decided to keep much news of the flu out of their papers. However, this was a very traumatic event as an estimated one-third of the world’s population (or close to 50 million people it is estimated) were infected by the virus. Furthermore, by the time it was over, 675,000 Americans died from the virus. It also came in three different “waves.” In addition, it brought on a deep recession worldwide. The largest group targeted by the pandemic were young adults between ages 20 and 40. It was particularly hard on American troops, and in its wake left many children orphaned.
There were also race riots and Black Americans, many who had served in World War I, wanted equal citizenship. While many of the country’s nurses were part of the war effort in France, the American Red Cross helped take care of afflicted citizens in this country. (I recently found a photo of my own grandmother decked out in a Red Cross uniform, since my grandfather was over in France with the Army.) As it turns out, Black nurses were not allowed to take care of patients on the home front until things became so bad, they had no choice but to use their help. And to add another layer of turmoil, there were subversive activities by foreign radicals that led to a growing isolationist feeling.
The first recorded flu cases were in March 1918 at a U.S. Army camp in the state of Kansas—wait, wasn’t that where Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz lived? More than 1,100 cases were recorded there. It is believed that American soldiers exported the flu to Europe. A second wave of the flu came in early fall 1918 when it emerged at an Army camp in Massachusetts. One doctor did mention it in his memoirs (A Doctor’s Memories), written by Dr. Victor Vaughan, published in 1926.
“I am not going into the history of the influenza epidemic…It encircled the world, visited the remotest corners, taking toll of the most robust, sparing neither soldier or civilian, and flaunting its red flag in the face of science.”
According to Nancy Bristow, author of American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, it made Dr. Vaughan question his profession and what they knew at that time about medicine. Even a book I read titled The History of the 304th Engineer Regiment, written by J. Frank Barber, (my grandfather was the Sgt. Major of the 2nd Battalion), stated the first enemy the troops met in France was the “Spanish Influenza” and inflicted the regiment’s first casualties. The author did not say how many soldiers died from the flu.
What do we know from historians about how our country handled the pandemic? Mask-wearing ordinances first popped up in western states and the majority of people complied. It was also local governments that led the initiatives to try and stop the spread of the virus. It became the patriotic thing to do as measures were taken to help protect the troops from the deadly outbreak. And, according to the Red Cross at the time, anyone who did not wear a mask was deemed a “dangerous slacker.”
Of course, just like today, the masks were considered “uncomfortable, ineffective or bad for business.”[1] At that time, most of the masks were just made of gauze, and the Red Cross distributed many of them. Homemade masks also popped up, and just like today, many “fashionable” masks were made from questionable materials that didn’t help keep the flu away. “To entice people to get to wear them, [cities] were pretty lax in terms of what people could wear,” says J. Alex Navarro, assistant director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and one of the editors-in-chief of The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: A Digital Encyclopedia.[2] There seems to have been a smaller percentage of people who went without a mask than we have today. They could be fined or put into jail (depending on where they lived).
And just like today, municipalities shut down public gathering places such as schools, churches, theaters and saloons.[3] People worried that their business would be hampered by the need to wear a mask or that masks were a false sense of security. This sounds familiar doesn’t it? Just as today, some communities flattened the curve with their regulations and had lower death rates, while others became what we term “hotspots.” One of those hotspots was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In mid-September 1918, the flu was spreading through all the army and navy installations in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, the city’s public health director, Wilmer Krusen, assured the public this was only the old-fashioned seasonal flu. Doctors, however, started to worry that this was more than just the seasonal flu. The public health director refused to cancel the upcoming “Liberty Loan Parade” scheduled for September 28, 1918, as they hoped to raise millions of dollars for war bonds. The patriotic procession included soldiers, Boy Scouts, marching bands and local dignitaries where an estimated 10-thousand people attended. “Just 72 hours after the parade, all 31 of Philadelphia’s hospitals were full and 2,600 people were dead by the end of the week.”[4]
What is more horrific, the second wave of the flu had morphed into something more deadly than the first wave in March 1918. It is believed a mutated strain of the virus was spread in Europe by wartime troop movements. Today, we know what occurred was a “cytokine explosion,” when the body’s immune system sends cytokine protein messengers to promote healing from a foreign invasion in the body. However, an immune overreaction can build up fatal fluid in the lungs. Doctors conducting autopsies at the time described the damage to the lungs as having the same effects as chemical warfare. The description of patient symptoms is gruesome with one doctor stating you could not tell the difference between a White or Black person.
The third wave of the Spanish flu broke out in Australia in January 1919 and spread from there to Europe and the United States. President Woodrow Wilson is believed to have contracted the flu during peace negotiations in Paris in April 1919. Also, the mortality rate of the third wave was almost as high as the second wave. The end of the war in November 1918, helped keep the flu’s spread from going as far as it did during the second wave.
All in all, this was a global pandemic that lasted over two separate years. By the summer of 1919, the pandemic finally subsided, with millions of people dead while others had developed a certain amount of immunity. In 2008, close to 100 years later, researchers had discovered why this flu was so deadly: a group of three genes enabled the virus to weaken patients’ bronchial tubes and lungs, bringing about bacterial pneumonia.
Historians also learned that public health officials were reluctant or unwilling to impose quarantines during wartime, so this aided in the spread of the virus. For instance, munitions factory workers were needed to help the wartime effort. (Doesn’t this sound similar to keeping meat packing plants open as essential today?)
Viruses are something we live with each year. Thousands die from the “seasonal flu.” People love to talk about ‘herd immunity’ and the need to strengthen our immune systems while others refuse to do anything until we get a vaccine. Naturalists point to vitamins A, B, C, D and other essential minerals as important to our immune systems, and the medical system is only now beginning to do more research into what makes some people’s immune systems stronger than others. It is known that as we age, our immunity decreases. And, there are doctors saying that by remaining quarantined, we are decreasing our immunity systems. Considering the idea of “herd immunity” the governor of Mississippi (Tate Reeves), put together some numbers to shed light on what it would take to achieve herd immunity (July 2020 on Twitter).
"The experts say we need 70-80% of the population to get COVID-19 to achieve herd immunity. Let's assume they're wrong (it's certainly possible, they have been before.) Let's assume they're being way overly cautious and we actually only need 40% infection for herd immunity. In Mississippi, our population is 3 million. We've had 36,680 cases so far. We'd need 1.2 MILLION infections to achieve that hypothetical 40% threshold. (Remember, experts say it's double that.) Over the last two weeks, our hospital system has started to become stressed to the point of pain. We are seeing the early signs and effects of it becoming overwhelmed. We had to suspend elective surgeries again. On our worst day of new cases, we had just over 1,000. It has typically been between 700-900 during this most aggressive time. To get to 40% infections, we'd need 3,187 new cases every day for a full year from today. We would need to TRIPLE our worst day -- every day -- for a year. I'm not one of these guys that immediately dismisses any idea that challenges the expert status quo talking points. I'm pretty skeptical by nature. That's healthy. But herd immunity is not anything like a realistic solution in the short or mid-term. I wish it was."
Others say, “The more you test, the more cases show up.” Hopefully, there is enough written about this current pandemic to keep the total number of deaths from reaching the horrific numbers of the 1918-1919 pandemic. And, do we have what it takes to help those who have lost their livelihood during this time to bring more equality to all our citizens?
Will we have learned important lessons from this pandemic that will help make us stronger and better in the future. Surely, there are more viruses out there and as yet, we have not conquered them. It is a part of life on this earth but let us learn from the past to bring hope to the future. Historian Nancy Bristow stated, “Something we know about trauma now is that when people suffer through really traumatic experiences…the opportunity to talk through your trauma and to be heard as you tell the story is really essential. So, the forgetting had consequences, I think.”[5]
[1] “When Mask-Wearing Rules in the 1918 Pandemic Faced Resistance;” Becky Little, May 6, 2020, www.history.com/news/1918-spanish-flu-mask-wearing-resistance.
[2] J. Alex Navarro, Center for History of Medicine, University of Michigan, “The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: A Digital Encyclopedia.”
[3] “Why October 1918 Waws America’s Deadliest Month Ever;” Christopher Klein, www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-deaths-october-1918?li_source=Li&li_medium=m2m-rcw-history.
[4] “Cities Tried to Halt the Spread of the 1918 Spanish Flu;” Dave Roos, www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-epidemic-response-cities.
[5] Nancy Bristow, “American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic;” quote to Becky Little.
SMALL SURVEY (20 Participants)
Percent of small business owners: 75%
Percent of Non-Essential workers still working: 40%
Percent of Non-Essential workers not working: 0.05%
Percent working from Home: 85%
Percent working from office away from home: 10%
Percent busier than before (pandemic): 10%
Percent not busy: 30%
Percent busy as normal: 60%
Percent seeing decrease in income: 50%
Percent seeing increase in income: 15%
Percent seeking business loans: 40%
Percent receiving loans at time (June 2020): 25%
Percent using time to re-evaluate life: 75%
Percent stating health not adversely affected: 90%
Percent stating health adversely affected: 10%
Most important word: FAMILY - 75%; HEALTH - 15%; HAPPINESS - 10%
Major theme for everyone: getting together with friends and family!
