The Australian
It’s making history, but not in a good way
ADAM CREIGHTON
The US reached another “grim milestone” in the never-ending Covid-19 pandemic last week, when the number of Americans who sadly have died from or with the disease surpassed 675,000.
Cue highly politicised fearmongering.
“Covid now deadlier than Spanish flu,” blared Forbes, oblivious to the fact the US population was a little more than 100 million a century ago and the average age of those who died from the flu virus was 28.
CNN suggested “most of the deaths could have been prevented”, in the “deadliest ever pandemic to hit the US”, and that the real reason was the “staggering selfishness” of the populace.
Karl Marx said history repeated, first as tragedy, then as farce.
Comparisons of the Covid-19 pandemic with the Spanish flu are absurd, a sign of how ignorant and hysterical we have become.
John Barry’s 550-page The Great Influenza, a magnificent piece of scholarship first published in 2004, chronicles a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions, the greatest tragedy the world has seen since the plagues of the Middle Ages.
When a new influenza virus wiped out 6 per cent of a 1018-strong French army battalion, incapacitating another quarter, within days in May 1918, the world learned of the unimaginable horror in prospect.
When the British ship City of Exeter transformed into a floating morgue sailing to Philadelphia from Liverpool, a quarter of its sailors dying en route, American doctors braced for a tragedy that was about to tear through the world.
More than 50 per cent of the population of Buenos Aires died, 3 per cent of all Africa and about 17 million Indians in less than a year. Doctors had never seen symptoms so horrific, a disease so deadly.
“It is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white,” US Army doctor Roy Grist wrote, referring to the extreme cyanosis in victims that often drew comparison with the Black Death.
Unlike Covid-19, people died from Spanish flu, never with.
“Blood was everywhere, on linens, clothes, pouring out of some men’s nostrils and even ears while other coughed it up. Many of the soldiers, boys in their teens, men in their twenties – healthy normally ruddy men – were turning blue,” Barry writes of a typical scene at US Army camps in late 1918, where soldiers assembled before heading to France.
At Camp Pike in Arkansas 13,000 of the 60,000 young men stationed there were hospitalised within days. One in 67 American soldiers – more than 50,000 – was killed by the virus within a few months, more than died in the Vietnam War.
The carnage was so horrific, so sudden, many couldn’t take it. Colonel Charles Hagadorn, in charge of 40,000 soldiers at Camp Grant, where thousands died, a veteran of wars in Mexico and The Philippines, committed suicide as bodies piled up around him. In Philadelphia, the worst-hit American city, authorities sent vans around the city to collect the bodies.
Unlike Covid-19, where 95 per cent of American victims have at least four comorbidities and die around age 80, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Spanish flu killed those with the most to live for, the youngest and strongest, those starting their families. New York City quickly had to find homes for 21,000 orphans.
Australian scientist and Nobel laureate Macfarlane Burnet, decades later, put the total death toll between 50 million and 100 million, in a world with fewer than a quarter of the almost eight billion people on Earth today.
More than 5 per cent of the world’s young adults were killed by Spanish flu, Barry estimates. The virus used the host’s immune system to kill the victim; the healthier, the quicker the death.
The US in 1918 wouldn’t have noticed Covid-19, which has taken 18 months to kill 4.5 million globally (from or with), having an infection fatality rate of 0.3 per cent at most, including 0.05 per cent of those under 70.
But the contrasts don’t end there. Wartime controls prevented the press from talking about the flu to keep up morale. Fear transfixed the US anyway.
In Phoenix, Arizona, a rumour spread, unfounded, that dogs spread the virus.
“People began killing their own dogs, dogs they loved, and if they hadn’t the heart to kill themselves, they gave them to the police to be killed,” Barry writes.
Almost everyone knew someone who died. Today, the opposite is true. In May this year about half of Americans said they didn’t even know anyone with Covid-19, according to a national survey. Yet at the same time 12 per cent thought they would die if they caught it, a powerful tribute to the power of fearmongering and our servile deference to social media rather than our own eyes and ears.
There are parallels too. The illusion of control was rampant then, as now.
“The masks were useless, the vaccine was useless, the city had simply been lucky,” Barry writes of smug authorities in San Francisco, which had a late 1919 outbreak. School and workplace closures did little to halt the contagious virus, Barry concludes.
And like today, Australia emerged relatively unscathed, losing “only” about 15,000, thanks to a successful quarantine of incoming ships, some of which had lost 7 per cent of their passengers en route.
The Spanish flu changed history, helping end World War I, devastating the German army ahead of its final assault in 1918. And it laid the foundation for World War II.
In Paris for peace negotiations, US president Woodrow Wilson in 1919 resisted France’s determination to extract a punitive settlement with Germany – until he caught the Spanish flu.
Wilson’s 25-year-old aide died within days, but Wilson trudged on, conducting negotiations with French prime minister Georges Clemenceau and British prime minister David Lloyd George. France got its way, helping fuel Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
Covid-19 also will change history, thanks to the hysterical overreaction and self-inflicted damage of measures. It won’t cause a war but it may have destroyed our liberal democratic society.
American doctors braced for a tragedy that was about to tear through the world
