 Yeah, welcome back to Think Tech in the middle of the coronavirus crisis. I'm Jay Fidel. This is History Lens and we're taking a look at the coronavirus by comparing it and taking a look at the Spanish flu back in 1918 and 19 with our favorite history professor who is John David and from Hawaii Pacific University. And it's a most fascinating comparison. Welcome to the show, John. Thanks, Jay. Pleasure to be on it and pleasure to bring this show to our audience. This is a really interesting topic and we can learn a lot actually from the coronavirus, from the Spanish flu and by comparing it to the coronavirus. So it should be fun. I mean, in a morbid kind of way, fun, right? Because the Spanish flu is a great feeling. I don't think that people, I don't think that people now, including people who studied history in school, you don't really understand what happened in 1918-19. It's really worth studying it on that basis alone because it was a terrible, terrible tragedy for the country. And now we look back and we don't see it that way, but we should see it that way. So tell us what happened. So in the other part of this, it's a morality tale about the temptation of ignoring this epidemic which became a pandemic. And that morality tale is very much relevant today because of course the president said, we're going to be done with this by April 12th, I think, and then everything's going to be fine. And it's like, well, okay, you know, it's not going to happen that way. But anyway, so yes, so the Spanish flu, we don't know that there's a whole lot. We don't know about the Spanish flu, although scholars have been able to piece together some of its, you know, pieced together the virus itself and the origins more recently. There's a great book on the Spanish flu by John Berry, I highly recommend. There have been several books written in recent years. So there's actually now a good literature on the Spanish flu and we can learn a lot about it. It's just kind of interesting to read. But so the Spanish flu, we now know because of genetic testing of the flu. We now know that the Spanish flu originated from birds transferred from birds to humans. And we're not sure exactly how this happened, but it's probably more than one species of bird and the virus got mixed between the two species and then transferred to humans. We think it started in Kansas and Haskell, Kansas. And so then the question is, why call it the Spanish flu? Why not call it the Haskell Kansas flu? Okay, it's not nearly as happy as the Spanish flu. It sounds xenophobic to me. It's just plainly the other guy. Exactly, exactly like the Chinese, you know, the Chinese coronavirus or like Trump, the Chinese flu. So the Spanish have been unhappy with this label ever since it started. It's not like the Spanish, it started with Spain. It's not like the Spanish had more cases than the rest of the world. Although it had a very big exposure to the flu and a lot of people died in Spain. It's because we think it's because the Spanish media, Spain was neutral in the war. That's another part of the context we'll have to talk about. Spain was neutral in World War I. They were not a participant. Therefore, they were able to be more honest than the rest of us, because the United States was about the more didn't want word to get out about the Spanish flu, about this flu, this influenza that was wreaking havoc, because that would give sympathy to the enemy and the Germans felt the same way, and the British the same way, the French the same way. So the Spanish actually were very open in their journalism about the Spanish flu. They were really honest about it. And in the end it helped them to get over it more quickly. So that's why we've ended up with the title the Spanish flu. It's kind of interesting. It really is. Yeah. What's the scope of the epidemic? I think we should set that out early because this was just... What's the scope? How many people infected? How many people died globally? Mortality rates. So we're looking at a world population of about 1.8 billion people. We think about a third of the world's population was actually infected. Now you think about that. One third of the world's population. That means if that happens this time around, that would be something on the order of 3 billion people, the 2.5 billion people. Oh my. You know, if we don't get a hold of this, we could really have something that's incredibly devastating with very high mortality rates. The Spanish flu, we don't really know the truth about mortality rates. There have been a lot of estimates. Even recently, since about 1995, there have been several scientists who have done new estimates about how many people died in this thing. We think now that maybe even 100 million people died from the Spanish flu, which would put the mortality rate at about 17, 18%, which would be really astonishing. That's incredibly high. And 100 million people. That's a country, right? That's a mid-sized country. Whiped out. So the Spanish flu was very infectious, but unlike the coronavirus, when you got it, you got sick right away. Within 72 hours, you were very sick. So more typical of a regular flu in that way. But then you got so sick that this is why the mortality rates were so high that this flu went immediately into the lungs and disabled the lungs' ability to fight against pneumonia infections in hours. So there are stories of businessmen getting on the train, not feeling that great, but getting on the train to go into work. And two hours later, they get into work and they collapse on the floor of their office and they're dead within another hour. And yes. So this thing, so the Spanish flu was lethal very quick. What happened is it would get into your lungs and because of disabled kind of immune productions of the lungs, then it would actually suffocate people. It would cause the lungs to basically shut down and not get oxygen into one's blood. And then people would begin to turn blue. There's a lot of descriptions of patients whose lips turn blue, whose whole face turn blue, whose chest would turn blue. And blue is because your blood is red only because it's oxygenated. When you take the oxygen out of blood, it's blue. And you can't live that way. So this is why it was such an incredibly devastating virus because when it hit, it was very rapid and a lot of people just couldn't recover from it. It hit so quickly. And the blue color was a kind of diagnostic tool. If you looked at somebody and saw a blue in his face or his lips, you would know what he had. It wasn't hard to mix. Somebody who couldn't recover. Because that would be the end of it. Now the other thing about the Spanish flu is the Spanish flu disproportionately hit people in ages 21 to 40, which is very different from the coronavirus from COVID-19 because COVID-19, we know, hits people, old people. People over 80 years old are really at high risk for this. Maybe 17 to 20% of those infected with the COVID-19 at that age are going to succumb to it. And the thing about the coronavirus is it takes a long time. It's got a long incubation period. And then once people get sick, if they get really sick, it takes them weeks to recover from this. That's part of the problem with hospital beds or COVID-19 is because of the length of the illness that people need to be in the hospital for extended time periods. So very different from the coronavirus, but the same in some ways. Now, when we think about the Spanish flu, we have to talk about World War I. The Spanish flu takes place in three time periods. It starts in Haskell, Kansas in February 1918. The war is on hiatus because it's the wintertime. But there's still people in the trenches in France and Belgium and other countries. And then that first bit of the virus seems like a regular flu. And so people are not very concerned. There's not quarantining and isolation and all of this. There are deaths at military camps, but it doesn't seem to be a much of a deal. And then the flu comes back in August 1918. And this is when it hits really hard and it hits very seriously. And so the war is going on. The United States now is in the war and mobilizing about 2 million men for the war. But most of the men are not at the front. They're in the camps, which you're looking at. They're in camps. This is a military camp at the University of Pittsburgh. And you look how close people are sitting. This is a makeshift camp. They would put these camps up in a couple of weeks. And then so this is where the virus really spread. In fact, there's one particular military camp, the Devon's Army Camp, right near Boston, was where this first blew up. And then in each of these camps, I mean, you're mobilizing 2 million people. You've got camps of about 50,000 to 60,000 soldiers. And there's overcrowding. And so it blows up at Devon's. And it's a tragic but interesting story at Devon's. The Army Surgeon General had given communication about how the Surgeon General and disease specialists who were consulting with the Army knew that it was possible that this flu would come back. And they were saying, hey, look, you need to have, you need to not have such overcrowding in the camps. And the commandant of this camp ignored it. And then the virus broke out. A hospital, you had the hospital with about 1,000 to 1,500 beds at the most. And you had 6,000 soldiers in that hospital at one point. And I mean, it's terrible. The bodies were being stacked like cordwood at the morgue, at the local morgue. So this is just a gross, horrific event. The commandant is so overwhelmed by it, he commits suicide. He shoots him. Really? What about the government though? What about the government, Sean? If that happened, when that happened, the government would have known about it. The government would have felt that it was an obligation of government to step in and do something. And that's an issue which exists today with coronavirus. Did the government do anything? No, not the federal government. The federal government never issued an overall kind of quarantine and isolation like the federal government has done today. So that's actually improvement on 1918. So no, local governments acted, some acted the right way, other governments acted the wrong way. And so it looked like at the beginning, this wasn't going to be a big deal in the spring. And then it came back and we think the virus probably mutated and got more virulent over the summer. This happens with viruses. And so the second go wrong with it was really horrific. So Devons, the outbreak starts there and then there are troops who are traveling from Camp Devons to the Navy Yard in Philadelphia. And this is early September, 1918. And all of a sudden, the outbreak spreads to the Navy Yard in Philadelphia. And this is when public officials really fall down on the job. So the outbreak happens, the Army Surgeon General knows about it. The regular Surgeon General knows about it. And they're recommending to the mayor and the director of the city of Philadelphia, hey, you need to shut things down. No more public meetings, celebrations. You need to actually do isolation measures here to keep this from spreading. And the director says, this is nothing. This is not going to hurt anybody. And there was this big parade plant in Philadelphia called the Liberty Bomb parade. And they held it every year. Hundreds of thousands of people, there's a picture of it. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the parade and they went ahead with it. What's wrong with that picture? They're all standing together within a foot of each other. Exactly. And spreading the virus left and right. A fierce outbreak took place in Philadelphia and people died in droves. And then the picture that Eric just put up of the, yeah, this is a newspaper article from a Philadelphia newspaper. And you can see there, these are groups of men digging mass burial, mass graves to bury the city's influenza victims. So it's really important to clamp down on this at the beginning and not ignore it. You know, the mayor and the director fill out, they were concerned about the war. The war is the thing. They were also machine politicians. I mean, they didn't, you know, they cared about their own survival. They didn't really care about the guy in the street except, you know, to vote for them. And so, you know, they were not enlightened in really any sense of the word. So, so that's, that's what happened there. And then the opportunity comes to mind, John, is this, and I'm sure you're going to talk about it. But, but it got worse. It went to Europe. Europe had a, you know, a lot of deaths, a lot of around the world and while it was going around the world, all these countries that were involved in World War One, they didn't even hesitate. They kept on prosecuting the war. Nobody, nobody said, hey, this would be a good time to stop the war and save lives. Am I right? Yeah. Well, there's a timing issue here. So the real, the second outbreak takes place in late August, September, 1918. And by September, 1918, the United States is actually winning battles in the European theater. The Germans are under a lot of pressure. And it's shortly after that that the Germans actually, they communicate with the United States with Woodrow Wilson say, hey, we want out. So it's actually a month later in October that, that, that the war stops. And then a, an official armistice is announced in November, November 11, 1918. So there is this timing issue in which the war is kind of wrapping up. So, so, but it's, it's true that the war that the virus spread in the trenches of Europe. And I've got a picture, I think of men in trenches. Maybe I don't have it. But anyway, so, so it did spread. And so interesting, after the virus broke out in Philadelphia, then the military actually did begin to take measures and they would put up signs. Like the one that Eric Schiller showed here, there's the military put up a sign at the Navy yard, which said that there it is. The Spanish influenza influenza has endangered the prosecution of the war in Europe. So, so it endangered it by infecting these military camps and making soldiers unable to, you know, right to get sick and maybe die. And so the 1500 cases in the Navy are 30 deaths already, and it was, it was exploding. So that was probably, you know, by the time they put the sign up, it was more. Don't spit is what they said. If you could bring that back up, Eric, this is kind of funny. The end says, don't spit, because there was some idea that if you spit that it would spread the disease. Well, this revealed a state of mind, don't you think the state of mind is they're using, they're using influenza and this crisis as a way to, you know, to prosecute the war. We, you know, don't spit because we don't want influenza to stop the war. The war was paramount. The war was priority number one. Didn't care too much. Yeah. They also lack basic knowledge about how this thing works. Okay. I'm still spitting. I'm sorry. The virus by spitting. I just think it's kind of funny. Anyway, and so other people were so afraid of the virus. There were, there were groups that put up signs saying you have to keep your windows open so the virus doesn't spread. I can't quite figure the logic out of this. Eric, can you bring that one up? This is the, you know, the one about keeping your windows open. Here it is. Keep your bedroom windows open, prevent influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis. Okay. Now, Jay and I have debated this. It could be that, that this was a genuine health of, you know, an attempt at a method to prevent, you know, the spread inside a bedroom. But on the other hand, it could be that this is the oldest idea in the disease community, which is bad air was responsible for the flu. My asthma was responsible for the flu. So I don't really know how this is going to help you not spread the flu. You know, if you're sleeping with, you know, five people in that bedroom, you're going to get sick whether you have the window open or closed. Desperate time, desperate measures. It reminds me of an article in the morning post. I think it was about this old notion. Maybe they were doing this in the Spanish flu, too, of trying to help people survive a disease by taking the blood of somebody who had survived the disease and injecting that blood. And on the argument, there was something good in that blood that would help you, like antibodies later discovered. Right, right. And who knows? I mean, actually, there's still, I think there were some experiments in China doing that same thing, taking plasma for people who have been sick and then injecting it into sick people. People who had recovered, you know, and injecting it into still sick people. We don't know. The truth is, you can create a vaccine by filtering the virus, right? The filtering the virus itself and then making it basically harmless and then, like all other vaccines, then injecting it into humans. But, and they're working on that. They're working on decoding the, you know, experts are, they've got the genetic code of the virus and they're working on creating a vaccine. I saw a special on 60 Minutes on this and apparently some people are saying, look, it'd be the end of the year at the earliest for a vaccine. Oh, yeah. So I think the desperate times, you know, bring desperate, desperate steps. And I think what your rendition of the 1918, 1919 Spanish flu shows you that people were really scared. And they were trying to find solutions, medical solutions, who knows what other kinds of solutions, irrational solutions, make up medicine just to have a better chance. You know, to reduce the risk for themselves. And that's that same kind of, you know, group psychology exists today, doesn't it? Oh, yeah. I mean, there were, there were people selling essentially snake oil and selling a lot of it to unkind of ignorant or unbeknowing folks who thought, you know, this would cure the Spanish flu. And today, I just, just read an article, I think in the New York Times about how there's this website, which is offering, offering vendors a chance to questionable vendors, a chance to sell potential cures for the, for the coronavirus. And in this website, the visits have just skyrocketed. So there are still people out there looking for kind of the bullet, right? They're looking for the magic cure, and it doesn't exist yet. So, folks, be careful of that. But it happened, yeah, this is human nature, right? So, now, interesting, so there were some places, there were some cities, unlike Philadelphia, that were, people were open about this and quite frank about it. San Francisco shut down, shut everything down. They were real honest with people. Gunnison, Colorado never had a case because they did a full quarantine of the city. San Francisco actually shut down and then they probably, probably opened things up a bit too early because it shut down in September, reopened the city in November, and then they actually had another outbreak of the flu in, you know, I think in December, early, you know, January 2019. And so the other thing about the flu is it affected everybody. It was much harder to quarantine leaders in that time period. And Woodrow Wilson got the flu in spring, spring 1919, when he was at the, at the, the Versailles conference, the Paris Peace Conference, he got the flu. And we think this is one of the things that had such a debilitating effect on Wilson. He was, you know, Wilson was this calm, rational guy who, who, you know, was very kind of sharp and analytical. And after he got, after he recovered from this flu, I mean, he pushed himself really hard at the conference. After he recovered from the flu, he was seemed to be much more rigid in his ideas, unwilling to negotiate or compromise. And, and it's interesting, John Barry and his book actually examines the kind of post flu impact of on humans and some indication that even those who recovered had some kind of brain trauma and, and kind of a lessened ability to think clearly, maybe some emotional problems associated with this. So, you know, it's, it's quite possible that this weakened Wilson to the point, you know, later on in the summer, then, he was doing whistle stop tour to, to promote the Versailles treaty to the American people. And he had a stroke. And it could be that he was so weakened by the flu that, because people would have it more than once Edward House Woodrow Wilson's advisor, he had it three times. Oh, no. So we can, we learn from this that, you know, you could have it more than once that it could mutate as it did and become more virulent. But the other thing which I would like to cover in our remaining minute or two is this, we never, we never came close to modern medicine. We, we had ideas about masks and containment and all. But we never, we never really had the medicines that could either cure it or prevent it. And therefore, wonder, wonder what happened in the end. Did this disappear by some magic process, as Dr. Trump would have, would have us believe will happen now. Yeah, what happens is what can happen with viruses after they, you know, they kill a lot of people and they run through a community. The virus viruses will change from one person to the next. If they, if they inhabit a person who's healthy, it's quite possible that the person who's healthy gives it to somebody else and the virus becomes a little weaker. We know we were pretty certain, we're not 100% we're pretty certain that it increased in its lead, lethality between this the spring and the late summer version of it. But it's also possible that the virus became weakened as it went through the population and killed lots of people but also killed those who had weakened immune systems. And then the healthy population recovered from it. And then as it was spread further, it's possible at least that this is how the flu eventually wrapped up. I mean, it didn't really wrap up until 1920. There were still cases of it in 1920, but we that's what essentially what can happen with viruses is, is eventually the healthy population recovers, they get immune to it. And then the virus becomes less powerful. I mean, I'm not a scientist, but I've read, read accounts that suggest that that could actually happen. I think that's probably what happened with the Spanish flu. And it's still around. I mean, it's the H1N1. That's the, it's the same virus basically. It's just, you know, it mutated became very lethal. Okay, that's been a very interesting discussion with John David and and we look forward to catching up with him again to make further comparison, not only about the Spanish flu of 1918 19 and I guess 1920, but other parallels that that have happened in history, and other responses that have happened in history so we can better understand the way this works. After all, you cannot understand where you are, unless you understand where you've been. History lens here on sync tech. Aloha John, and see you soon.