I’m going to divert a bit here from the background and leadup to what happened. Looking back, I realize that even I am bored with reading it, and that’s not the goal. I also realized that even if we are staying home, it’s hard to come up with an entire new post every day because other things get in the way, so while “daily” is the goal, sometimes we may not accomplish that.
So let’s talk history a bit. I may do more detail later, but just an overview.
Since roughly the “Dark Ages” in Europe, we tend to have pandemics (at least as far as the world was known at the time) every 100 years or so. 1720 – 1820 – 1920. It’s not exact, but close enough for discussion purposes.
There is some memory – not in most of us, but through our grandparents / great-grandparents – of the Spanish Flu of 1918.
There is a wonderful book about it, which for some unknown reason I read about five years ago – The Great Influenza, by John Barry. At 550+ pages, it is a somewhat daunting tome, but the audio version is easily digestible (all 19 hours, 26 minutes)! (And for those wondering, “listening” counts as “reading” since all the words go into your brain!)
Here’s the thing. That flu probably didn’t start in Spain but started elsewhere in Europe which, just coincidentally, happened to be in the midst of WWI and kept it secret so Spain took the fall for it (sound familiar?) – took out half a million people.
We can blame it on the lack of medication or medical equipment, or limited medical knowledge or lots of things that relate to the state of the world in the early 1900s, but the reality is that the spread of that pandemic was attributable primarily to the proximity of lots of people together.
The failure to isolate.
Lots of these people were close together because they were being trained to go into the military or were returning from the War, especially in the United States.
So not only are they doing all kinds of drills and being physically together for work, the slept in open barracks and then were packed on transport ships.
Breathing the same air. Eating together. Touching each other, without a thought in the world about appropriate social distancing.
Now at the time, it was known that disease could be transmitted by simply being in the proximity to others. Smallpox, Measles, Diphtheria – they were all transmitted by the virus shedding and then being picked up by others, which was why people – entire families – were quarantined and locked away from the rest of society until they were no longer contagious.
There are two places that had entirely different experiences during the Spanish Flu Pandemic.
In 1918, Philadelphia had a parade scheduled to promote the sale of War Bonds. (Remember, troops were coming back from the war and the government needed money). Despite warnings from public health officials, the parade continued in front of a crowd of 200,000 people on September 28, 1918. By October 1 (FOUR DAYS), there were 635 cases in the city.
The flu went through the city, initially taking out 600 sailors at the Philadelphia Navy Shipyard. Within six weeks, 12,000 people had died from that single exposure event.
That lapse in judgment – the decision to put commerce ahead of human life – was devastating.
Now compare that with Gunnison, Colorado – at the time, a community of 1,300 people that was at the intersection of two railroads, so there was lots of traffic through the community.
Admittedly, Philadelphia was a major city – 1.7 million people -- so there are obvious differences in the two, but the fundamentals are the same.
Gunnison made it through the first two pulses of the Spanish Flu epidemic without a single case.
Not one. Because they isolated, and in a big way.
They closed off the town. Barricades were erected. Citizens were deputized, curfews were enacted and violators were arrested. They were some kind of serious about it not for a day or a week or a month. Nope. They shut that sucker down for FOUR MONTHS.
Let’s think about this – 1918. No internet. No television. No radio, for the most part. Only about 70% of the population was literate (although there is some confusion about this. I guess lots of people didn’t fill out those little cards for the census and mail them back in). Lots of places didn’t have electricity (or indoor plumbing!), and the ever-reliable Sears Catalog provided all the strikin’ paper anyone had.
That is a LOT of sittin’ in houses significantly smaller than most of us have with MUCH larger families than is the norm now, looking at each other with little to say or do other than to think, “If he sucks his teeth one more time . . . . “
Gunnison was not the only town to do this. There were several others that implemented similar measures with excellent results; Gunnison was just lucky enough to implement their lockout before anyone who was infected made it into town. Cases of the flu happened there only in the third wave, when restrictions were lifted too soon.
Is this information secret, something that I ferreted out after hours and hours in dusty library basements at institutions of higher learning, the diligent scholar toiling away in obscurity on a doctoral dissertation that will not likely be unread? Is it a focused legal brief, relevant only to the parties in a case and perused only by opposing counsel (the judge being too busy to actually read what most lawyers submit?
Nope. Found it all sitting on the couch online in the time it takes to enjoy one evening cocktail (an Old Fashioned made with Knobb Creek Burbon, thank you), when I also discovered it was also put in a 2006 report prepared by the University of Michigan Medical School for the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Think about that folks. Our government had the information, all pulled together and summarized, undoubtedly with those charts and graphs that people who write those types of reports for the government love, along with a concise and very readable Executive Summary stapled on top.
Here’s the report, although admittedly even under strict isolation conditions I don’t have the patience to read all 275 pages:
However, for a much shorter (and more interesting) article about the author and his credentials, try this one:
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