Condemned to Repeat the Past, Part Two

As I pointed in my previous post; there were some similarities between the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

In 1964’s Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) faces the embodiment of the Red Death (also Vincent Price).

The world had over one hundred years to prepare for another pandemic, but somehow public health never received the funds it needed (after the 1918 Spanish flu).
Perhaps, the memory of the 1918 pandemic was just too frightening, and the experience had to be buried.
Perhaps, being fully prepared for a pandemic is just impossible.

We've known for a long time how human disease can affect history.
Justinian’s Flea, by William Rosen, explains how the Bubonic Plague (541-549 AD) “killed at least 25 million people; depopulated entire cities, and depressed birth rates for generations,” leading to the Dark Ages.
The 1918 Spanish Flu at least doubled or quadrupled that number, killing an estimated 50 to 100 million people.
However, that flu likely led to the Allied forces beating Germany, and winning WWI,* also shaping history in that sense.
We’re waiting to learn had much COVID-19 will affect this era.
One fact seems obvious.
But for COVID, America would likely be in the middle of a second Trump term.

British actor and political activist, Sir Tony Robinson praised Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918 on the British cover jacket, predicting (in 2018) that “another pandemic could be just around the corner.”

This article is about the differences between the 1918 Spanish Flu and COVID-19.
(Since scientists don’t fully understand either pandemic, a layperson writing this article is an absurd project.)
One difference is in the symptoms.
Both viruses were “shape-shifters,” and each were mistaken (at first) for the common cold.
In Pandemic 1918, British author Catharine Arnold [Note the British spelling of medical terms.] describes symptoms of the Spanish Flu, as the second wave hit, and the disease developed into a more aggressive form:

In the summer of 1918. . . victims collapsed in the streets, haemorrhaging from lungs and nose. Their skin turned dark blue with the characteristic ‘heliotrope cyanosis’ caused by oxygen failure as their lungs filled with pus, and they gasped for breath from ‘air-hunger’, like landed fish. . . Others suffered projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhoea, and died raving as their brains were starved of oxygen.

Catharine Arnold recounts how the Spanish flu starved President Woodrow Wilson’s brain, and he became delusional during his serious bout with the flu (in April of 1919)—during the Paris peace conference.
President Wilson dragged himself out of his sickbed, and rearranged the hotel furniture, saying (perhaps, in a letter or diary):

The greens and the reds are all mixed up here and there is no harmony. Here is a big purple, high-backed covered chair, which is like the Purple Cow, strayed off to itself, and it is placed where the sun shines on it too brightly.

The California State Board of Health advocating that to avoid the 1918 Spanish Flu, people should wear masks.

Essentially, the 1918 Spanish Flu was a bird/avian flu (H1N1 influenza A) and the infected animal (whose virus infected a human) in COVID-19 was (most likely) a bat.
Victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu died from secondary bacterial pneumonia, while victims of COVID-19 usually died from organ failure.
According to the Columbia University Department of Surgery website, hundreds of patients in the U.S. have received double lung transplants, due to COVID-19.

Dr. Edwin Jenner of the CDC (Noah Emmerich) whispers to Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) in The Walking Dead (“TS-19,” season 1, episode 6) that “Everyone is infected.”

The zombie is an allegory for infectious disease.

Besides the difference in symptoms, the two viruses hit different population groups.
COVID-19 mainly kills people older than 65, as well as people with comorbidities (like diabetes and obesity) and impaired immunity responses.
However, the 1918 Spanish Flu tended to strike people between 20-40, enjoying the prime of their lives—fit vigorous soldiers, and young women of child-bearing age.
Young Walt Disney caught the Spanish flu at the age of 17.
James Thurber was 24 when he became ill.
Georgia O’Keefe was 31.
All of their lives could have cut short if they had died from the flu.
(What we need to remember is that this was just a tendency, and NOT a rule. All types and ages of people caught the Spanish Flu, and all types and ages of people are catching COVID-19.)

Dr. Kimberly Shiroma (center, Tamilyn Tomita) in the 1990s American TV series about fighting biological disasters and conspiracies—The Burning Zone.

While the German DVD packaging is on the web, we're unable to locate an English language version. The series also doesn’t seem to be currently-available on streaming services. 

Wonder why???

While there’s little evidence that there was asymptomatic spread with the Spanish Flu, it’s evident that there was asymptomatic spread with COVID-19.
In Dr. Deborah Birx’s book, Silent Invasion, she comments that “asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and even mildly symptomatic spread are particularly insidious, because, with these, many people don’t know they are infected.”
She comments that it was a “huge miscalculation” for the CDC to expect “the new coronavirus to behave like seasonal or pandemic flu.”
Dr. Birx determined that there was asymptomatic spread with COVID-19, and she used math to accurately predict the number of cases.

COVID-19 is reaching double the number of countries on the globe as the 1918 Spanish Flu did—likely, as a result of greater air travel, and the greater intertwining of economies in this century.
In 1918, communities in Alaska could protect themselves with armed guards, and South Pacific islands could bar visitors from landing.
Today, few places are remote enough to prevent contagion.

It’s also interesting that while I can’t find any indication that people caught the Spanish Flu more than once, people are coming down with different strains of COVID-19 multiple times.
Sometimes, patients even have two strains of the COVID virus at the same time!
Public health officials urge those over 65 to make sure that their vaccinations are up to date.

*According to Pandemic 1918, by Catharine Arnold: “By May, influenza had crossed effortlessly over ‘No Man’s Land’ to hit the German army. . . the disease affected 139,000 men during June and peaked in early July.
Influenza had brought the all-conquering German army to its’ knees, while the Allies, stricken too, took advantage of their enemy’s weakness to regroup.”

Condemned to Repeat the Past, Part One

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905)

Edvard Munch did a series of self-portraits as he was recovering from the 1918 Spanish Flu.

Famous painters who died of the flu included Egon Schiele and Gustave Klimt.

I think of George Santayana’s aphorism often when I think of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (the “forgotten pandemic”).
When the office I worked in shut down (in March of 2020) because of COVID, and higher-ups asked employees to all work from home, I also recalled John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza, Gina Kolata’s Flu, and Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague—all books that I’ve read over the years. 

Conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) wears his homemade hazmat suit, and places an anti-vaccine flyer on a car, in 2011’s Contagion.

Those books were all in my “disease library” because I’m “somewhat obsessed” with epidemics, pandemics, viruses, plagues, and diseases.
Part of this obsession is due to my Sicilian grandmother (Maria) dying, at the age of 22, in October of 1918 from the Spanish Flu.
She died in a tiny Chicago apartment with my eleven-month-old father, and his 27-month-old toddler brother, nearby in a crib.
No one is sure where my grandfather had wandered; but (according to family lore) my great-uncle (Sam), discovered his dying, pregnant sister-in-law during a wellness check.
In doing so, he likely saved his two nephews from starvation and death.

The 1996-1997 TV show The Burning Zone , which combined epidemics with X-Files-style conspiracies, only lasted 19 episodes, but I was riveted by every episode.

It starred from left to right, Agent Michael Hailey (James Black), Dr. Kimberly Shiroma (Tamlyn Tomita), Dr. Daniel Cassian (Michael Harris) and Dr. Edward Marcase (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). 

I just finished other, more recent, books on this macabre subject—Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918, and Jaime Breitnauer’s The Spanish Flu Epidemic and its Influence on History.

These two books come at the subject from a more personal angle than the scientific perspectives of the books mentioned above—emphasizing the lives, and deaths, of the victims.

Until I read these books, I didn’t realize how much my Dad and Anthony Burgess (the famed British author of the novel A Clockwork Orange), had in common.
His young mother (Elizabeth) was found dead of the Spanish Flu, with her dead eight-year-old daughter in her arms, and her 21-month-year-old son (Anthony Burgess) playing nearby.
(The Spanish Flu, and COVID-19, have in common that they produced a high number of orphans.) 

The Spanish Flu and COVID-19 have several other issues in common.
Both caused death all over the globe, and had significant impacts on the global economy.
The commonly-held belief is that the 2018 Spanish Flu killed 50 million people, but according to Pandemic 1918, “Spanish Flu killed upwards of 100 million souls during 1918-19,” and the true figures are unrecorded.

According to the World Health Organization, there have been nearly seven million deaths, so far, due to COVID-19. 

Elegant mask-wearers in 1918 London. 

Both pandemics ignited public debates over the wearing of masks, and the “mask lesson” was ignored in 2020.
In 1918-19, countries and states created mask laws, so that people could make this minor sacrifice for the collective good.

A streetcar conductor refuses to allow an unmasked rider on board in 1918 San Francisco.

San Francisco, California, was a hotbed of debate in this regard.
According to Pandemic 1918, a San Francisco attorney fought the strict mask ordinance, arguing that it was “absolutely unconstitutional.”
(Enthusiastic policemen had filled the San Francisco city jails with unmasked scofflaws, and arrested 110 people on October 27th, 1918 alone!)
According to Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History (by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta), Trump, and his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “were adamantly opposed to actively promoting the use of masks, and face coverings began turning into a partisan Rorschach test of whether you were with Trump or against him.”
While some people refused to wear masks in 1918, it was never politicalized as it was in 2020-2023.

President Woodrow, the president in 1918, and President Trump were both flu victims, and they both came very close to death.
However, both presidents also downplayed their respective pandemics, and politicized their responses.
According to Nightmare Scenario, Wilson’s “dishonesty about the scope of the outbreak led to more sickness and more death.”
According to Abutaleb and Paletta, Trump’s lack of empathy,* worry about his “tough guy” image, and thinking mainly about economics also led to unnecessary deaths.
Although the U.S. developed superior vaccines—and produced them more quickly—the U.S. had a higher death rate than Britain, Germany, Canada, Japan, and many other industrialized nations.

Americans were encouraged to “Eat More Onions” to keep Spanish Flu at bay.

During both pandemics, there was confusion as to possible treatments.
When New York doctors placed children with Spanish Flu on the Roosevelt hospital roof (to get the benefit of fresh air), the general public called it “outrageous.”
In 1918, British doctors used potassium permanganate (a general disinfectant) on public schoolboys to treat flu.
In 2020, Trump grasped at straws, and touted the old anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, and the Ebola drug Remdesivir, as “magic” cures, before either drug could be vetted for the new off-brand use.
Hydroxychloroquine turned out to be not useful at all!

We’ve all heard of “long COVID.”
While people can get “long COVID” after having either mild COVID symptoms, or severe COVID symptoms, people who recovered from a bad case of the Spanish Flu (like President Woodrow Wilson) “were sometimes left with a lifetime’s legacy of nervous conditions, heart problems, lethargy and depression.”
(Pandemic 2018, by Catharine Arnold.)
“Long Spanish Flu” and “long COVID” sound very similar to laymen ears.

We still aren’t certain of the identity of “Patient Zero” for the Spanish Flu, or COVID-19.
According to 2004’s The Great Influenza, the 1918 “Patient Zero” was an U.S. army cook who died in Haskell County, Kansas, in early 1918.
However, Pandemic 1918 (published in 2018) places Patient Zero a year earlier, naming Private Harry Underdown—an English soldier who died in France, on February 21st, 1917.
As to the location of COVID-19’s start, our government places COVID’s transmission from animal (a bat?) to a human in Wuhan, China—either in a “wet” market, or in a lab.
However, in April of 2020, the deputy director of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Zhao Lijian) taunted President Trump, alleging that the virus “might have” originated in an American soldier who traveled to Wuhan. 

The comic No Ordinary Flu, produced in 2006 by King County in Seattle, Washington

You can read the entire comic HERE.

Essentially, the U.S. had over one hundred years to prepare for another pandemic and while the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all wrote playbooks, and published white papers, the threat wasn’t given nearly the budget that it warranted.
The horrors of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic weren’t mentioned in school textbooks, or even covered well in medical textbooks.
The world decided to forget the lessons from the “greatest medical holocaust in modern history”—part of the U.S. edition subtitle for Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918—and paid the price in 2020-2023.

This is Part One of my article comparing the 1918 Spanish Flu to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This part deals with the similarities between the two pandemics.

Part Two, next week, will deal with the differences.

*President Trump seemed to exhibit little empathy for COVID-19 victims. This is odd because his grandfather, Frederick Trump, died of the Spanish Flu in late May of 1918. According to Trump biographer Gwenda Blair, Frederick was out walking with his 12-year-old son Fred (Trump’s father) when he suddenly felt ill and was rushed home to bed. He died soon after.