Deadly history repeats as COVID-19 surges

In September 1918, after the Associated Press issued a report about how the Spanish flu had spread at Camp Travis in San Antonio, military officials there initially cried fake news, only in the parlance of the time.

While soldiers had been hospitalized officially with “cold symptoms,” a colonel said of the AP story “such report is not only not substantiated by facts but is positively dangerous to the morale of the Camp.”

More dangerous than the accurate news story was that the Spanish flu had, in fact, arrived at Camp Travis and by the end of the month hundreds of influenza cases were reported there and at Fort Sam Houston.

This anecdote is courtesy of Ana Luisa Martinez-Catsam, a historian with the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. In 2013 she published the journal article “Desolate Streets: The Spanish Influenza in San Antonio.”

It’s a retrospective that is also prescient for this moment as cases of COVID-19 surge across Texas and rip through San Antonio. While there are many anecdotes from Martinez-Catsam’s scholarly work I could have chosen to lead with — an obsession by local officials on cleanliness that had nothing to do with preventing the Spanish flu stands out — it’s the stickiness of truth that matters most.

As John M. Barry, author of the bestseller “The Great Influenza,” wrote in the Smithsonian Magazine in 2017, “In most disasters, people come together, help each other, as we saw recently with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. But in 1918, without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people looked after only themselves.”

We could also say in 2020, the year of COVID-19, “without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated.”

In many ways, we are on our own to look out for ourselves and to navigate impossible choices about sending kids back to school, heading to work or even voting as COVID-19 cases surge. Choices made as our national leadership engages in repeated sophistry about the disease.

“If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” President Donald Trump said earlier this month.

Like so much of what he says, that’s not true. We would still have cases, just not confirmed. But it also wasn’t true in March when Trump said, “Stay calm, it will go away. You know it is going away.”

Or as Vice President Mike Pence recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “We are winning the fight against the invisible enemy.”

The case numbers here in Texas — where Gov. Greg Abbott has faltered, pulled by the gravity of political pressure to avoid a mask order and to quickly reopen at the expense of our health — undercuts this claim of “winning.” So, too, the roughly 125,000 deaths nationwide. So does the crisis in Arizona.

As Barry, a professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, told me in an interview: “We are at risk of losing this game. People are going to lose their lives because people at the top have failed to execute a perfectly reasonable plan.”

And the cornerstone of that plan, he said, is to “tell the truth. For people in authority to tell the truth. That’s No. 1.”

Truth guides physical distancing, wearing of masks, handwashing and staying home when you feel sick. Truth guides economic reopening.

And this brings me back to Martinez-Catsam’s research about San Antonio during the Spanish flu. She describes a San Antonio where local leaders refused to accept reality, or truth.

This took many forms. For starters, local officials marketed San Antonio as a health center somewhat insulated from the disease.

Local officials did not initially close schools or businesses, and by the time they did, the disease was rampant. In another misstep, the city reopened too soon only to have to shut down again. It’s easy to see a parallel with Abbott’s decision to supersede aggressive local stay-home orders and quickly reopen.

Tourism officials in 1918 also sought to market San Antonio as a health destination, inviting outsiders to visit — and spread their germs. Again, we see a modern parallel with the business community: Visit San Antonio’s brief effort to woo the Republican National Convention here this summer, despite objections from Mayor Ron Nirenberg and County Judge Nelson Wolff.

“It’s frustrating,” MartinezCatsam, a San Antonio native, told me. “You look at what went on and you are seeing these similarities and you are wondering, basically, look at what’s happened before, take note of what happened before.”

And what happened? In the end, 53 percent of San Antonians became sick with influenza. No amount of wishful thinking kept them healthy or safe. What will historians say about this moment?