I wanted to write a piece titled “Love in the Time of Novel CoronaVirus” but that didn’t seem appropriate. People are scared. The global markets are in free fall more days than not, and this could very likely lead to a recession just when Brooklyn College students are entering the job market. Long story short: there’s not a lot of love going around.
When scary events are happening, we as a community in the pursuit of learning must follow our tradition. We must hit the books.
Let’s take a look at some things that we know about the current pandemic and compare them with the Spanish Flu of 1918.
So, “Coronavirus” is a poor name for this, because almost any cold or flu is similar to it. When you google symptoms of COVID-19, you’ll see fever, runny nose, and other ailments that are typical in any common cold.
COVID-19 is better because it stands for CoronaVirus Disease 2019, and calling it “Wuhan Virus” is just racist. Did you expect that racist attacks were just going to happen to people from Mexican heritage when Trump was elected?
Few people under 30 have died with COVID-19, and the rate of mortality for the majority of college students is less than one percent. That should hopefully be good news. Still, be cautious, even though new H.I.V. cases are low, you should still use a condom.
So why are younger people at a significantly lower risk? One possible reason is something known as “antigenic imprinting.” This makes the case that the first flu you get will create a blueprint in how your body will fight all other flu’s for the rest of your life. Your immune system will remember how it fought your first flu and fights the next in the same way. So you could make the argument that if your first flu was a modern one, like the SARS outbreak in 2002, then your body would be better prepared to fight this one.
It should be noted that information on COVID-19 is probably not entirely accurate. Many governments have been trying to control the story. The Chinese, Iranian, and United States governments have been aggressively trying to limit the information.
Now let’s get to Spanish Flu. It gets its name because the Spanish press was the only free press in 1918 that reported the deadly flu.
The Spanish Flu likely started in Kansas, with the first outbreaks being reported on an army base. It likely traveled to Europe via American soldiers going over to fight in World World I.
The United States government censored reporting of the 1918 flu. President Wilson passed the Sedition Act in May of 1918 that made reporting any bad news about the war illegal because it would lower morale and turn people against the war effort. This allowed the Spanish Flu to spread and kill like wildfire.
During the summer of 1918 there was a War Bonds Parade in Philadelphia in which more than 200,000 people attended. Within 48 hours, the city’s hospitals were overrun, 4,500 people died as a result, and people were buried in mass graves.
It should be noted that a virus does not last long in the body after death.
In Philadelphia in 1918, the number of deaths probably overloaded the system responsible for disposing of bodies. This is something we could see again if morgues become overwhelmed, as mass graves are more efficient than cremation.
A lack of transparency seems to be the worst thing you can do with an epidemic like the one we are seeing today. This is the lesson of the 1918 Spanish Flu.
In an effort to cover up the issue at hand, just as was done during the Spanish Flu,
Iranian officials did nothing when COVID-19 was reported in their country. They said it was fake news. Then it took over their country and mass graves were again being used. Additionally, customs agents at JFK airport were aware of COVID-19 in December, which was a month before China officially acknowledged they had a public health issue.
So how bad was Spanish Flu? Recent estimates cited it had a death toll of 50 to 100 million people. One-third of the world’s population caught it. Remember, this was when the world was much less interconnected. But also remember, the medicine has advanced a lot since then.
But to put this in perspective, more Americans died from Spanish Flu than in U.S. Wars combined. It was the deadliest flu virus our country has seen so far. More people died in the first 25 weeks of Spanish Flu, than in the first 25 years of the HIV/AIDS virus.
President Trump’s Grandfather, an immigrant, was one of the first victims of the 1918 Flu. President Trump is a known germaphobe.
Spanish Flu started in 1918. It’s deadliest years were 1920 and 1921 and it ended in 1957. It made the jump from birds to humans, and finally adapted to humans by the late 1950’s. It is known as the mother of all flu’s because almost all current flu strains can be traced back to it.
Getting back to antigenic imprinting for Spanish Flu — unlike COVID-19, people between the ages of 20-40 were the hardest hit by the Spanish Flu. This was likely because older people at the time had seen a similar strain of flu in the past, presumably the Russian Flu of 1889.
Since younger people have stronger immune systems, their bodies responded better to the Spanish Flu virus. Unfortunately, this worked against them. A Cytokine storm occurred. This is an autoimmune response where the body sends fluid into the lungs to fight the disease, causing people to drown from inside their bodies. Spanish Flu, also known as Avian Flu, festers deep in the lungs and led to a fast death. People could feel fine in the morning and be dead before the day was over.
Spanish Flu was deadly at the start, but when summer turned to fall, it came back stronger because it had mutated to a deadlier virus. Viruses are always mutating. I imagine that today’s COVID-19 also stands a chance of mutating into a stronger or weaker virus.
Can there be a cure? Maybe. All flu viruses have common parts to their genetic code, which makes it possible to develop a cure in the laboratory.
This is why flu shots can be good in mitigating symptoms of COVID-19. Other reasons to get a flu shot is so as not to confuse the normal flu with this one. It can reduce the overloaded health care system and also having the flu sucks.
Washing hands with soap for 20 seconds is actually really effective. COVID-19 spreads in droplets from one person to another. The virus is surrounded by oily materials that soap is really good at destroying.
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially called COVID-19 a pandemic. It’s a scary word. What it means is that the work will change from containing the virus to mitigating it.