Post 223 - October 20, 2020

Day 223…

In March of 1918, there were outbreaks of a flu-like illness reported in the United States. The first major outbreak arose in Fort Riley, Kansas where more than 100 soldiers came down with it.

Over the following six months, sporadic outbreaks occurred in various places around the country and in Europe and possibly beyond.

Travel in 1918 was far less extensive than it is now, but the main vector for the initial transmission seems to have been US soldiers who were being deployed all over the world to fight in World War 1. Without that factor, there wasn’t the kind of international travel among ordinary people, yet, that would have allowed the virus to spread as easily as it did.

In September, a second wave of the virus began in Boston at a training camp called Camp Devens. By the end of September there were over 14,000 cases and 757 deaths reported.

Then it really spread. 195,000 Americans died in October, alone.

There was a massive shortage of nurses because so many had been deployed overseas in the war. There were trained African American nurses available, but there was a racist resistance to using them.

On November 11, 1918 Germany capitulated and signed the Armistice and the war was over. Millions of soldiers then returned home and brought the flu with them. Later that winter and into January of 1919, there was a third wave of the virus. In April, President Woodrow Wilson collapsed at the Versailles Peace Conference in France while negotiating the peace treaty, most likely because of the flu.

By the summer of 1919, the virus largely disappeared. By the time it subsided about 500 million people, about a third of the planet’s entire population had become infected. At least 675,000 Americans lost their lives to it and somewhere between 20 and 50 million people around the world lost theirs.

A hundred years ago, there were no vaccines or antivirals to treat the flu. The first approved vaccine for the flu didn’t appear until the 1940’s.

What they had was aspirin.

Bayer trademarked aspirin in 1899 and that protection had expired in 1917. Several companies started producing aspirin during the pandemic. At the time medical professionals recommended a dosage of 30g a day. To give you an idea of what that means, no reliable health professional these days would recommend anything above 4 grams. It is now thought that many of the nearly 200,000 people who died in the US in October of 1918 may actually have died of aspirin poisoning.

The Federal government offered little or no guidance to its citizens. They did not want to alarm the population who they thought were already over-traumatized by World War I. So, it fell to local governments to implement safety mandates. Unsurprisingly, responses were much the same that we are seeing today. Some were effective and some were not. Some resisted doing anything at all.

By the summer of 1919, the Spanish flu disappeared.

Since then, there have been several other flu pandemics. About 70,000 people died in 1957 and 1958 from an outbreak. 34,000 Americans lost their lives in the years 1967 and 1968 from another one. The swine flu pandemic of 2009 and 2010 led to 12,000 deaths.

We have learned a lot about how disease spreads and how it can be treated in the last century. Both the Swine Flu and the Ebola outbreak in 2014 could have been major pandemics but they were able to be contained.

1918 is just not that long ago. All four of my grandparents were young adults when it struck. Our collective memory should be strong enough to be able to recognize that a hundred years later, we are following the Spanish flu timeline beat by beat.

Why anyone would expect COVID-19 to behave in an appreciably different manner than its predecessors, boggles the mind. We do not know how to cure this virus, but we certainly know how to contain it. Why aren’t we?

The decision has been made not to.

What this Administration seems to be consciously doing is to implement policy that duplicates what happened back then when we didn’t know what we were doing.

The President keeps saying that we’ve “turned the corner” and that the danger is passed when it clearly hasn’t.

We know that not only was he briefed in early spring about how dangerous this was going to be but that he understood the implications of it. His exchanges with Bob Woodward support that.

The Washington Post, last month, reported that there have been at least 34 times since this started that the President has publicly said that the virus will “simply go away”.

He and his Administration seem to be pinning their hopes on the fact that if a third or more of the US population gets infected, as they did in the last century, then they will either perish or survive creating so-called ‘herd immunity’. When that happens, the flu will be over.

He has done everything he can to discredit the health professionals around him who are getting in the way of that by trying to save lives.

William Haseltine, a health professional himself, said of Dr. Anthony Fauci, "Tony Fauci has been the most clear, consistent proponent of the measures the United States needs to protect itself from a deadly disease,"

The President said on a call to his campaign staff yesterday, "People are tired of Covid. I have the biggest rallies I've ever had, and we have Covid, People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They're tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots."

This isn’t stupidity and neglect on the President’s part. This is his actual plan. Let people get sick and die and then those who are left will survive and move back into their lives. Not only does he not want people to protect themselves, he wants people to gather together and spread the virus as far as possible.

There is nothing random whatsoever about what he’s doing. The sooner everyone gets it, in this Administration’s thinking, the sooner we will get through this.

In 1918, the population of the United States was 103.2 million people. In 2020, the population of our country has risen more than three times that to 328.2 million people.

By following the 1918 template, our government is saying that they are willing to accept about 2 million deaths to get us through this crisis.

The big ‘if’, of course, is that COVID-19 will behave the same way that the Spanish flu did. They are betting that come summer, after 100 million US citizens have become infected with it, it “simply disappears”.

As of today, there are over 40 million cases of the coronavirus that have been reported world-wide. The real number is likely much higher. After a brutal spring and summer, we are looking towards a fall and winter that will likely be far, far worse.

All indicators are trending up. 58,000 infections were reported in the US on Monday. That’s the worst since July. 400,000 people have become infected in just in the last week.

So far, 8,224,396 people in the United States have contracted it. If the spread continues unchecked as it is now doing, then that number could increase tenfold.

That’s what this Administration wants.

We will get past this crisis, but is that really how we want to do it?

C. Vaile Wright is the senior director of health care innovation for the American Psychological Association. In an interview today, she said, "I can't remember any time in my lifetime, or most people's adult lifetimes, where you've had this many adversities. It's the cumulative effect of one thing on top of another on top of another -- to the point where I think people are either just going numb to it or feel so overwhelmed that they're frozen."

Her advice to all of us is rooted in basic common sense: Exercise, sleep, meditation and the practicing of appreciation.

That may sound a bit, dare I say it, crunchy, to some, but, simply, that’s what we need to be doing now. Taking care of ourselves.

We don’t have to follow this Administrations cruel and selfish course of action, even if the rest of the country seems to be OK with it.

If 2 million people dying seems like a reasonable cost to get our pre-pandemic lives back, instead of the number, think of those people in personal terms - your friend, your spouse, your parent, your child. How many of those people are you willing to lose so that you can get back inside a movie theatre? That’s exactly what’s being sold by this Administration as the solution to this crisis.

Yes, we can all vote in two weeks, but there’s plenty more that we can all be doing as well.

We can all wear masks. We can all practice social distancing. We can all take care of ourselves by trying to eat better and getting some more exercise in. We can take a walk and bring along a crisp harvest apple to snack on.

Above all, we can be kind.

We can be kind to the people we meet, and, above all, we can be kind to ourselves.

None of this is easy for anyone. So much is raging around us that is completely out of our control.

In 1932, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote what has now commonly come to be known as the Serenity prayer. Early versions of it worked their way through churches and by the 1940’s it started being adopted by many 12-step programs.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.”

No matter how hopeless it all may seem, there is far more that we actually have the power to change than you might think.

Being kind to ourselves is a perfect way to start.