Since the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, we have been in the grips of a global crisis that rivals the Great Flu epidemic of 1918-1919. Separated by a century, there were many parallels between the two crises that call to mind the adage, ‘those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.’
The 1918 flu pandemic, also known as the Spanish Flu epidemic, because the first public reporting on it originated in Spain which as a neutral was not under the wartime censorship restrictions of other countries, infected 500 million people out of a global population of 1.8 billion and is estimated to have killed 17 million. The COVID pandemic as of December 2022 has infected 649 million out of a global population of 7.8 billion and has caused approximately 6.65 million deaths.
Comparing the two in terms of the medical impact is a tricky proposition for a number of reasons. One, the population of the earth today is approximately four times as large. But medical science is also light years ahead of where it was in 1918, so one would expect the impact to be less. The science of vaccine development of today is a rocket ship compared to the lumbering galleon of the early 1900s, as are things like communications and other health delivery systems.
There are also some significant differences that people might not be aware of. The 1918 flu primarily killed younger people, with 99 percent of fatalities in people under the age of 65, compared to Covid which killed more older people. Another big difference is in the status of countries affected. The flu devastated poor countries of the global south while Covid hit the world’s wealthiest economy hardest of all. The United States had 10 million infections and one million deaths, the highest of any other country in the world, including some of the poorest.
In the area of nonmedical impacts, though, there were similarities in both outbreaks that are worthy of consideration.
Quarantine and masking when done properly were found to be effective in controlling spread of the flu in 1918, but there were people who objected to masking. There was in San Francisco, for example, the Anti-Masking league. Because the vaccines of the time were made with live viruses, there was also resistance to being vaccinated. Sound familiar? Masking, isolation, social distancing, and vaccination became such politically polarized issues in the United States that as late as December 2022, certain American politicians were insisting that the U.S. military be legally prevented from requiring its members to be vaccinated, despite the fact that an infectious disease like Covid can make a unit ineffective for long periods of time, affecting national security significantly. The opposition to the Covid vaccine also ignored the fact that the military requires other vaccines, but there have been no objections to those mandatory shots. Bringing this up in a conversation is a sure-fire way to end that conversation because there is no logical answer to it.
This is just one of the nonmedical impacts of Covid, the one getting the most attention, while others exist but seem to be ignored.
Take, for example, Covid’s impact on the supply chain. Lockdowns, border closures and travel restrictions brought some industries to a standstill and they have not recovered—some might never recover. Many small businesses that were required to shut down operations due to Covid will never reopen. Merchants and manufacturers raised prices because of scarcity of goods or raw materials, hitting consumers at a time when business scale backs were causing loss of income. Some of those businesses that raised prices have solved their problems, but prices remain up.
The political schisms and schemes that developed due to the pandemic seem to have become a permanent part of the political landscape. Autocrats who used Covid as an excuse to limit freedom and crack down on opponents have entrenched themselves and will be difficult to dislodge, and even in so-called democratic countries, a strain of authoritarianism has taken root and it will be hard to root it out in the short term. People have lost faith in government and the purveyors of misinformation and disinformation have occupied a significant part of the media space.
We’ve developed vaccines that will eventually deal effectively with Covid and its variants, provided we can maintain the political will and public support for their use. But that same lack of political will and public support will make it hard to solve the nonmedical problems. – NWI
