How does a pandemic end? Some answers

For centuries humans have been urged to rely on history to avoid making mistakes in the future.

That advice is believed to be a path to the end of the current pandemic, according to Time magazine.

The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 offers a possible clue. It did end.

It was the deadliest in the 20th century: It infected about 500 million people and killed at least 50 million, including 675,000 in the United States.

Today, it’s hoped that a workable vaccine will solve the global problem, but it may be some time down this ancient road before people can be wholly assured of a miracle solution.

That end of the earlier pandemic came in part because the virus ran out of hosts to catch it and then spread it.

The 1918 pandemic led people to believe that it was finished by the spring of 1919, but it spiked again in early 1920.

As with other flu strains, the flu may have become more active in the winter months because people were spending more time indoors in close proximity to one another and because artificial heat and fires dry out skin and the cracks in the skin in the nose and mouth provide “great entry points for the virus,” explains Howard Markel, physician and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan.

Flu “does tend to go quiet when the cold weather regresses, but no one knows why,” he said.

But by the middle of 1920, that deadly strain of flu had, in fact, faded enough that the pandemic was over in many places, even though there was no dramatic or memorable declaration that the end had come.

Social distancing was also a key. Public health advice on curbing the spread of the virus was eerily similar to that of today: Citizens were encouraged to stay healthy through campaigns promoting mask-wearing, frequent hand-washing, quarantining and isolating of patients, and the closure of schools, public spaces and non-essential businesses — all steps designed to cut off routes for the virus’ spread.

A study that Markel and Navaro co-authored, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2007, found that US cities that implemented more than one of these control measures earlier and kept them in place longer had better, less deadly outcomes than cities that implemented fewer of these control measures and did not do so until later.

It wasn’t until 2005 that articles in Science and Nature capped off a nearly decade-long process of mapping the genome of the flu strain that caused the 1918 pandemic.

The scientists tell us that people can help the effort to limit the impact of the pandemic.

A century ago, being proactive about public health saved lives — and it can do so again today.

Mr. President, anything is better than dreaming up fairy tales. Mark these words.