COVID winter is coming
Heed the deadly lessons from flu pandemic of 1918
Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, implied at the Republican National Convention that the pandemic is over and that under the president’s leadership it was decisively defeated. Although he did concede that the pandemic “was awful,” comparing it to the f lu pandemic of 1918, he told us that the markets are now booming and that “right now, our economic health is coming back.” As proof that the Trump administration believed that the pandemic is all but over, 1,500 unmasked spectators gathered close to each other in the Rose Garden to hear Trump accept the nomination for president.
The same optimism was exhibited during the flu pandemic of 1918.
During the early outbreak of the “Spanish flu,” President Woodrow Wilson’s administration went into deep denial. To speak of the flu was considered an act of sedition — it was believed that knowledge of the flu’s existence and deadly nature would undermine the war effort. Nevertheless, the public was urged to take precautions out of a patriotic duty to the returning troops. People started to quarantine, close schools, and wear masks in an effort to thwart the flu’s spread.
During the summer of 1918, when the epidemic seemed to lessen its grip, businesses reopened and people threw away their masks. The public health commissioner of Detroit went so far as to call masks “pure fake” and politicians began calling the “flu epidemic” a hoax deigned to undermine an America at war.
In September 1918 we relaxed our safeguards. Schools and businesses that were forced to close reopened. As the surgeon general of the Army’s 1919 report noted, “The epidemic declined during the cold dry weather in the winter, increased again with the advent of the chilly damp weather in the spring, then declined to a comparatively low rate to continue throughout the summer.”
In September 1918 when we were at “a comparatively low rate,” some physicians thought protective measures should continue. They warned America, as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warns us today, that there could be a second wave. But the public demand for a return to normalcy prevailed. Those who were in favor of reopening in September 1918, said — as Kudlow tells us today — that the flu was all but over and that, in spite of the pandemic, the Dow Jones average was soaring.
Kudlow is correct: This September the Dow is poised to hit all-time highs. But the same was true in September of 1918: from May 1918 to October 1919 the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 22 percent, but by the time the Spanish flu ended, in early 1920, it had killed 675,000 leading to the recession of 1920-21.
But neither the soaring Dow nor Wilson’s optimism had any effect on the virulent Spanish flu of 1918. On Sept. 18, an outbreak in Philadelphia’s Navy yard infected 600 sailors. City fathers, convinced that these “spikes” were meaningless, decided to go ahead with a patriotic parade to sell
Liberty Bonds. Many warned against holding a public event of that sort given flu’s apparent reemergence, but the director of Philadelphia’s Department of Health and Charities gave assurances that the epidemic was on the decline and the new outbreak was a “small spike” that could be extinguished.
On Sept. 28, the parade brought together 200,000 patriotic Americans. John
Philip Souza led the band, followed by a 2-mile-long parade of unmasked, undistanced marchers.
By Oct. 1, there were 635 new cases of the flu. By Oct. 3 the city of Philadelphia and its schools were forced to shut down. Within six months, 16,000 Philadelphians had died. Packing crates were used as coffins and bodies were stacked in cold-storage plants awaiting burial by family members.
It wasn’t only Philadelphia — cities across America again closed down. Mask ordinances and quarantines were imposed, and it wasn’t until December 1918 that stores and factories began to open with staggered hours. This second wave lasted from September 1918 through 1919 and was far more virulent than the first.
If, as Shakespeare said, the “past is prologue” and Santayana was correct that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we should be very concerned in reflecting on the admonition from “A Game of Thrones”: Winter is coming.
Sol Wachtler, a former chief judge of the New York state Court of Appeals, is a distinguished adjunct professor at Touro Law School.