A ring of truth about pandemic’s lessons
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10-to-20 million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks…”
George C. Scott as General “Buck” Turgidson in “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
I’m not saying Stanley Kubrick’s satiric masterpiece from 1964 is a movie for our times. Not me.
But if you haven’t seen it lately, now would be the occasion in this spring of the plague year. Even if you’re lucky enough to have remained employed during the pandemic and only emerge from your dog sled harness long enough for 90 minutes of recreation after your 12-hour day, there are laughs galore.
In the film, shot in glorious black and white, a deluded, paranoid military leader (stop me if you’ve heard this one) played by Wilton’s own late, great Sterling Hayden, launches a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Scott, as the head of the joint chiefs of staff, proposes using the accidental advantage to wipe out the Cold War foe, even with the strong possibility of a counter attack and some hair mussing.
Today, the ever-growing possibility of nuclear war still lingers, of course, along with the hard fact of global warming, evidenced by extreme weather patterns and melting ice caps.
But the threat of coronavirus literally breathing down our necks is what has us behind locked doors at this moment. There’s a template for dealing with the coronavirus that’s easier to perform than halting climate change or freezing ICBMs in mid-air, because most of us can avoid public exposure, mask-up and observe social distancing.
As a reminder of what’s at stake, all I have to do is look back 100 years and see Great Aunt Margie Purcell’s engagement ring.
Even better, take John M. Barry’s book “The Great Influenza” about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, for the lessons both learned and unlearned among the 17- to 50 million who perished.
I got a chance to ask Barry a couple questions the other day during a webinar sponsored by the National Press Foundation.
Barry, a Tulane University professor who lives in the French Quarter down there in New Orleans, took an hour to talk with reporters and editors from throughout the country.
Barry reminded everyone that very little actual information was released about the flu’s dangers at the time, because the United States was finally involved in World War I and such things were state secrets. The government of Woodrow Wilson, who we now know was a racist, enforced the Sedition Act of 1798, putting people in prison for such things as telling the truth about the flu.
“New York never closed anything,” Barry said, noting that the saloon and theater owners got the Democratic political machine known as Tammany Hall to protect their interests. Even though New York City likely had the best public health department in the nation at the time, the flu came in waves.
I asked Barry if there was any kind of regional cooperation in battling the virus, similar to the new seven-state effort by northeast states including New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
“Not that I know of,” he said. “There was some communication between different health departments but not necessarily ones that were contiguous.”
What saved many lives, Barry calculated with the help of scientists, was the kind of herd immunity that doctors today aren’t yet sure can occur with COVID-19 infections. Back then, though, those who survived the spring 1918 outbreak built up the antibodies to combat the second wave.
“New York actually had a relatively benign experience if you call 33,000 deaths benign,” he said. “On a per capita basis that wasn’t bad. The best vaccine we ever had provided 62-percent protection. “You had up to 89-percent protection from first-wave exposure against the lethal second wave. I think that first wave in New York was a major factor in protecting the city against that second wave.”
But sadly, there were few lessons learned when the flu faded in 1920. The National Institutes of Health weren’t created until 1928, another bad year for influenza. Vaccines were finally developed in the 1940s.
“I was actually surprised myself that there wasn’t more investment in public health and so forth,” Barry said.
So what does Great Aunt Margie’s engagement ring have to do with all this?
The jewelry, tiny diamond chip and all, was purchased by her fiance, who died in the influenza pandemic unaware of terms such as social distancing and flattening the curve. His name is lost in family memory. Aunt Margie lived with my mother’s family in Hamden during the Great Depression.
She never married.