"The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." — Harry S. Truman
Normally, I wouldn’t post a link to a 40-minute video, especially one with ads (which are skippable with a click). But these are not normal times, and the documentary embedded after the jump on what came to be known as the “Spanish flu” shows what can happen when the initial public health response to a developing epidemic is inadequate. The documentary provides insight into what happens when authorities do not take the most elementary precautions and spread happy talk about the course of the disease. As my colleague Laura Clawson noted two weeks ago, this is precisely the approach the Trump regime has taken in handling the U.S. response to the novel coronavirus now spreading across the country.
The flu of 1918-1919 was exceedingly virulent and took many of its victims in exceedingly grotesque ways. Even though the coronavirus now spreading COVID-19 across the land is nowhere near as nasty, it’s vital to know what can happen when ignorance, neglect, and foolish policies are rampant.
Ultimately, 675,000 deaths were attributed to the Spanish flu in the United States, although that count has its doubters—after all, in New York City, statisticians stopped counting after they had tallied 33,000 dead. Also unknown is how many secondary bacterial infections in victims of the flu might have been conquered if antibiotics had been available. One thing we now know is that a key reason for the death toll was that the Spanish flu virus attacked the bronchial tubes and lungs, opening the way for bacterial pneumonia. Worldwide, the death toll is said to have ranged from 50 million to 100 million of the half-billion estimated to have become infected. The American toll was more than the combined fatalities of all U.S. wars from the founders’ revolution on except the Civil War.
“Spanish flu” is a misnomer. Wherever the virus emerged, it wasn’t Spain. What happened was that other European nations that were at war heavily censored medical reporting because they didn’t want their enemies to know they had an epidemic on their hands. Spain was neutral. The press there reported the disease. In a subsequent editorial, The Times of London labeled the outbreak the “Spanish flu,” and the name has stuck for a century.
The documentary makes a case for the virus originating at Fort Riley, Kansas. But that’s just one of three theoretical sites for its origin, the others being France and northern China. Whatever the case, the pandemic spread incredibly rapidly. Most of the afflicted died within a few days of becoming aware of their symptoms. Or worse: Said Yale epidemiologist and Prof. Charles Edward Winslow, “We’ve had a number of cases where people were perfectly healthy and died within 12 hours.”
If you don’t have a lot of time, skip ahead to the 15-minute mark to catch the full impact of the American experience with the virus.
If you can’t view embedded videos, copy this code and plug it into YouTube: watch?v=UDY5COg2P2c&feature=youtu.be
Here’s one story recounted in the documentary: In August 1918, the flu’s deadly second wave struck Camp Grant, a military encampment near Rockford, Illinois, built to house 50,000 men in close quarters. On Sept. 21, the first men were reported sick. Two days later, 400 men were sick. A day later, the first death was recorded. Hundreds more reported sick over the next few days. By Oct. 1, more than 100 men at Camp Grant had died of the flu, and it had spread to the civilian population. The camp commander, Col. C.B. Hagadorn, urged the press not to publish the names of the dead because already there had been a flood of telegrams inquiring about the situation at the camp. Hagadorn subsequently killed himself. The ultimate toll at the camp was about 1,000 dead.
Four days after the first report of illness, 3,000 men from Camp Grant boarded a train for Fort Hancock near Augusta, Georgia. Here’s the documentary’s narrator:
For the journey of almost 1,000 miles, the men were packed tightly into train cars with poor ventilation. In the tight quarters, men coughed, became feverish, and began bleeding from their eyes and ears. They infected each other swiftly and the virus swept along the train. The train stopped repeatedly along the journey to refuel. And the men who could still walk got off the train to get a break from the hacking coughs of the sick and delirious men. There they interacted with railroad workers and curious locals who had come to see the troops. They infected town after town for almost 1,000 miles.
When they finally arrived in Georgia, 2,000 of the 3,000 men were so sick they needed to be hospitalized immediately. They started a new outbreak at Fort Hancock. Historians don’t know how many of the men from the train died, but one report from Fort Leonard Wood claimed 10%. [But with so many dying] the medical staff stopped keeping medical records. “One robust person showed the first symptoms at 4 o’clock PM and died by 10 o’clock AM.”—Journal of the American Medical Association. The same thing would happen at bases across America. At Camp Custer in Michigan, 2,800 troops reported sick on a single day.
Again, COVID-19 is not the Spanish flu. But the virus does kill, and it obviously spreads easily. And, like the Spanish flu, it could mutate into something worse. That’s no happy thought, with the man behind the big desk in the Oval Office lying to us two weeks ago, "[W]hen you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done."
Nothing he has done since then indicates that he has moved far from what has been, at best, his reckless, and, at worst, malicious response to the disease and the havoc it can play with the population. All that matters is shoring up the stock market and pretending that, somehow, Democrats and media are at fault.