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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*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.
