Pandemic Audio Reading Reflections

As our world started to enter the worst pandemic in over a century, my mind kept wondering how this would compare to other worldwide disease outbreaks, specifically the worst two pandemics in history. I listened through two outstanding works on the so-called Spanish Flu (that most certainly did not start in Spain) of 1918 and the Great Courses lectures on the fourteenth century bubonic plague better known as the Black Death. All three were fascinating and, actually, gave more hope than fear, but certainly a strong warning, in our current COVID-19 Pandemic.

Jeremy Brown is an emergency room doctor and published his well-researched Influenza less than a year before COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China. It is a prophetic warning but predicted an influenza pandemic rather than the coronavirus pandemic that has infected the whole world. It is shorter and easier to read than Barry’s epic, and it looks more at how influenza works in our world today while providing a briefer overview of the 1918 epidemic.

John Barry’s The Great Influenza was released in 2005 but has climbed back up the charts in the coronavirus pandemic. It provides a detailed look at the 1918 influenza epidemic, including the fullest history of the development of American medical research I have ever read. It was shocking to discover how limited medical research was before the 1870s but how far it had developed before the influenza was discovered in Kansas in early 1918. Medical researchers were actually not caught off guard and suggested immediate quarantine action that would have curtailed its spread, but President Woodrow Wilson and others in leadership had fought hard against their isolationist opposition to get America into World War I, and the US war machine was hard at work to get as many soldiers and weapons to Europe as possible. After an astute doctor in Haskell County, Kansas, first recognized the risk, it appeared a few hundred miles away a Camp Funston, near Fort Riley, then spread to Army bases across the country and to Europe, hopping on troop ships, then later spreading around the world, killing more than 50 million people, most between the months of September and November 1918. Although over 500 pages long, Barry’s account is breathtaking in its research and detail, although some epidemiologists now question the certainty of some of his claims.

I have enjoyed listening to Great Courses for over fifteen years. Dorsey Armstrong’s account of the Black Death quotes hundreds of sources from every facet of European life and paints as clear a picture as we can gather 650 years after the worst pandemic in human history. Although most experts believe more people died in the 1918 flu pandemic, the Black Death killed a much higher percentage of the population of Europe – at least a third. Armstrong considers the evidence for its cause and spread and spends more time reflecting on its impact on culture, the arts, commerce, religion, and government.

Audio reading all three in the midst of what may be the third worst pandemic in history brought several thoughts:

1. We should have seen this coming – We certainly cannot blame the people of the thirteenth century for not expecting a pandemic, but even their societies quickly recognized the severity of the danger they faced. Yet the world of 2020 did not do much better than the world of 1918 in spite of all we have learned in the last century. Brown points out how many experts have been expecting something of the magnitude of the coronavirus, even if much of the preparation was not well thought through – like storing millions of doses of perishable treatment for a specific virus when there are hundreds of forms a viral epidemic can take. We have faced several might-have-been pandemics in the last twenty years: SARS (2002), the H1N1 Swine Flu (2009), MERS (2012), and Ebola (2013-16), among others. Decisive, immediate action likely spared the world an earlier global outbreak, and hundreds of thousands of lives could have been spared had the Chinese listened to the earliest voices of doctors who saw the risk of COVID-19.
2. Our pandemic is not nearly as lethal as the other two – Although this season is unlike any I have ever seen and every life lost is a tragedy, we can be grateful the COVID-19 mortality rate is a fraction of the Spanish Flu and the Black Death. Much higher than expected positive antibody test results show that many people have had the virus without symptoms. This has led some experts to predict mortality rates (the percentage of people with the virus who die) as low as 0.3%, while the UK has seen nearly 14% of its confirmed cases end in death. Even the worst of these is much less than the estimated 40% morality of the other two outbreaks.
3. Though it is happening much more slowly than we hoped, things are getting better – Yes, we have seen a rise of cases recently. This is troubling and certainly due to more social gatherings without protection. However, the hospitalization rates have not increased and deaths have continued to decrease. (Let’s pray this remains the case.) We can attribute this to the drop in the average age of those infected. Younger adults have gathered and shared the virus with one another. They get sick, but most do not die. This is one big difference from the 1918 Spanish Flu where the death rate was much higher for those aged 18-40 than older adults. Certainly World War I had a huge impact on this, but even young adult civilians at home were more likely to die than their parents. That influenza was a very different virus from COVID-19. Hospitals across the country have open rooms and ventilators. At its worst in April, approximately one-third of all deaths in the US could possibly attributed to the coronavirus. The last week of June 2020, in the midst of a fresh spike of new infections, the CDC reports only 157 deaths out of the total 11,351 across the entire nation were attributed to COVID-19. That means only 1.5% of all people who died last week did so because of the coronavirus.
4. Keep social distancing and remain quarantined, if possible, if you are in a high risk group – The spike should warn us, though, that this is not over. If you don’t have to leave home, don’t. If you do, wear a mask. If you are over 65 or have a compromised immune system, have someone else go for you while you stay quarantined. (75% of all who have died from the coronavirus in the US were over 65.) I have friends suffering now who probably did not choose to follow all those cumbersome rules. I know it is a pain, but this will pass eventually. We should take heed of what happened in New York and New Jersey in March and April. Our medical professionals are much better prepared now, but the risk of overflowing intensive care units remains.
5. Get vaccinated when you can – I know that many well-meaning Christians have bought into the vaccine-conspiracy theory, but Barry’s book tells the miracle stories of vaccines that have saved the lives of millions who likely would have died from yellow fever, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, and many other diseases that were huge causes of death in the nineteenth century. No, they are not perfect, but I think effective vaccine development is a great example of humankind carrying out our first mandate to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Increasing numbers of parents not vaccinating their children is opening the door for reemergence of some dreaded diseases. Several promising COVID-19 vaccines are in the final stages of testing. Unless the virus mutates itself to impotency and/or humanity achieves herd immunity (as a combination seemed to happen with the Spanish Flu seemed to in 1919), the risk of more outbreaks remains until enough of humanity has either had the disease or been vaccinated so the virus has no safe place to land.  

Yes, this is the most challenging season in my lifetime, but “this, too, shall pass.” Let’s make it to the other side together.