Then and now

I continue to wrestle with the relative societal seizing/hysteria over Covid-19 versus similar new viruses in 1968 and in the late fifties and earlier flus, most notably Spanish Flu in 1918-20.

I have posted earlier that I went back to a number of general histories on topics in the immediate post war era and the 1920s where one might expect at least some passing mention of the enormous toll taken by the Spanish Flu (estimated at some 500,000 Americans) and how there was virtually no mention.

It occurred to me this past week that my grandfather and grandmother had an accelerated wedding in 1918 as he prepared to head off to France to fight. She was 20 years old and she and my grandfather would have been in the generational cohort most directly affected; the Spanish Flu being noted for its mortality among adults 18-30.

I called my mother to see if she had ever heard her mother (my grandmother) relate any stories about the Spanish Flu, deaths of friends or families, the presumed panic. Her answer? "No, she never mentioned it."

So we still have this study in contrasts. A well intentioned but panicky closing down of the economy in order to prevent the overload of the healthcare system. A virus with a death rate that appears to be high by annual averages but within the norm of what we see every decade or so. A virus which takes mostly victims in the last weeks of their lives when they are dying of other conditions rather than those in the prime of their lives.

Why are we so panicked when comparable viruses in the fifties and sixties were numerically similar in deaths but not remarked upon at the time and no special actions taken?

Is this truly some sort of sick side effect of an hysterically partisan conflict? Simply a product of the desperation of a dying media culture ravenous for clicks?

While plausible, those still seem to me to be exaggerated explanations. But I have no adequate alternatives.

The only thing I can come up with is that perhaps in 1918, not only were we inured to the sudden death reports of World War I, but possibly the magnitude of the death rates were not so visible because we did not have centralized national reporting in the fashion we do today. NBC, ABC, CBS, WaPo, NYT and others all run with the same national stories out of Washington, D.C. and New York.

Perhaps in 1918, relying on local news, we missed the larger context. We got the death lists locally but simply could not form a national picture and therefore form a broader sense of magnitude. This would make sense at a time when we were also inured to periodic local excess deaths from typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, etc. We were accustomed to periodic and somewhat frequent spikes in deaths but which were local. And we did not have the national perspective to put the pieces together when everywhere suffered spikes simultaneously.

It is a somewhat logical argument but still seems inadequate to me.

Perhaps we were simply psychologically more robust then, accustomed to shorter and more precarious lives, and none of what seems in hindsight to have been exceptional, appeared to them at the time out of the ordinary.

I don't know but it feels odd. Which inclines me to think that the issue is not how they responded then but how we are responding now.