The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A look back provides insight into today’s COVID pandemic
— Although much has been revealed since the influenza pandemic of 1918 on how devastating the effects of highly infectious diseases can be, those living through the COVID-19 outbreak can still learn a great deal from history.
Wesleyan University assistant professor of AfricanAmerican Studies Jesse Nasta, new executive director of the Middlesex County Historical Society, shared this as Nasta helped facilitate a recent webinar on the subject.
“Pandemics in Perspective: Middletown’s Response to COVID-19 and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” was presented virtually by five panelists — by a recent Wesleyan graduate and experts in medicine and history.
Those living now can learn much about today’s world from those who have come before, Nasta said.
“To the greatest extent that the historical society can put Middletown’s past in conversation with the present, it makes history extra meaningful, and shows how immediate the concerns of history are,” Nasta said.
The project began when he first came aboard in May, in the midst of the pandemic, and created a survey asking people in Middlesex County to share their stories and photographs of how they were coping with COVID-19.
Wesleyan student Sarah Mount presented a slideshow for the program, accompanied by statistics she researched during her junior year. It took her a year.
Five panelists spoke: Nasta; Mount; William Johnston, the John E. Andrus Professor of History at Wesleyan; and Middletown family physicians Drs. Michael Good and Ruben Hirsch, founders of ProHealth Physicians.
They helped set up the first outpatient COVID-19 testing site in Middlesex County 13 days after the first tests became available in the United States.
At the end of January, Good and Hirsch recognized the virus posed an unusual threat. “We instituted the measures that we last used for the Ebola virus outbreak of 2012,” Good said during the discussion.
In Connecticut, the virus began to arrive “primarily from people who worked in New York City and commuted up the I-95 corridor,” he said. “By April 1, three weeks after our first case, we jumped from one case to 3,557 in Connecticut. In just three weeks — an absolute explosion.”
News involving the outbreak traveled quickly, “due to the miracles of modern technology, unlike back in 1918, when it took days to get or confirm information,” Hirsch said during the presentation.
During the early days of COVID, he and Good obtained information in real time from their contacts in Italy, China and the West Coast. “These reports were alarming, giving us deeper insight into the potential seriousness of the impending pandemic,” he said.
“I read somewhere that the [influenza] pandemic hit everyone equally,” said Mount, an economics and environmental studies double major graduate with honors. She discovered that victims fell into three socioeconomic groups. “I wanted to test it, and the way to do that was looking close to home.”
She consulted health department death records, which listed what the cause of deaths, focusing on data on those who perished from influenza and pneumonia, as well as documents and books at the historical society. Mount concentrated on a three-month period from September to December 1918.
She soon uncovered that the city was broken up into three groups at the time: natives, immigrants whose parents were born outside America, and foreigners who had emigrated to the United States.
Census records from 1920 only listed a person’s cause of death and occupation, Mount said, which made it impossible to determine their socioeconomic status. “If you were an immigrant, you were more likely to not be able to read English, and if you were illiterate you were more likely to be poor.”
Immigrants died disproportionately of the flu, she said. “Sometimes, I would step back and look at the names and remember that these were people, and you put yourself in their shoes.”
The influenza pandemic, which stretched from 191720, had three waves. The second was the worst, Nasta said.
Just 14 years into its existence, Middlesex Hospital, founded in 1904, was overwhelmed with patients because it only had capacity to treat 100 people.
Some of the guidance in 1917-20 included “ridiculous” advice, such as to keep one’s feet dry.
“We shouldn’t judge people in the past too harshly because we also have a very incomplete understanding of COVID as such a new pandemic,” Nasta said.
Early on in the COVID outbreak, several untruths were spread, such as people saying gargling with salt water is a way to prevent getting the disease, he said.
Just like a century ago, “we don’t know everything and we’re not immune to disaster,” he said. America lacked a national response to the crisis, similar to now, he said.
The general belief was the flu was caused by a bacteria — not a virus.
There was no way to test people a century ago. “They were 100 percent blind in 1918. You only knew you had the flu once you had fullblown symptoms.”
That year was also the first where face coverings were widely used. “There’s a famous image of the entire Seattle police department with face masks on, which is such an interesting image,” he said.
With WWI already raging, president Woodrow Wilson barely acknowledged the flu pandemic, Nasta said. Back then, the only means of mass communication were newspapers and the telegraph.
Similarly to now, there were those who felt masks were unnecessary, but politics wasn’t woven into public discourse like it is now, he said.
So far in Middletown, 88 people have died of COVID, amid a population of about 46,000. One hundred years ago, 220 residents perished from the flu, when those who lived in the city numbered 13,000, a third of what it is now. “Per capita, the number of deaths was about 14 times greater than COVID has been so far. You can imagine how staggering that is,” Nasta said.
“With COVID-19 we came to understand that probably 10 or 20 percent of people would get quite ill and would need support with oxygen, IV fluids, later on antivirals, and convalescent plasma,” Good said.
If there were no hospital and ICU beds, the death rate would have been higher, Good said. “Not the 1 percent that you often hear but more like 10 percent, as happened in Italy and Spain during the peak of their outbreaks.”
Mount was particularly touched by the death of a mother who died in October 1918. Her and her husband’s 3-month-old baby perished a couple weeks later, followed soon after by the family patriarch.
“Everyone lost someone. There was not a person not touched by the disease,” she said.
For a recording of the webinar, contact the historical society at mchs@wesleyan.edu. To view Mount’s presentation, visit bit.ly/2QrRXNj.