Like most of the rest of the world I've been thinking about diseases lately. What I've been thinking about is how mild the coronavirus epidemic has been. No, stop shouting at the screen and look at some numbers.
The Spanish Flu: the post-World War I influenza epidemic caused 17-50 million deaths; I've seen the figure of 20 million most frequently so let's use that. World population at the time was about 1.8 billion, so that represents a death rate of 1.1 percent of the entire population (not just the infected).
Coronavirus: deaths currently stand at just over 200,000 people. Let's be pessimistic and assume twice that many die of it before the epidemic subsides. The world currently has 7.8 billion people. That would be a death rate of 0.005 percent. The influenza was 200 times more deadly.
I'm not trying to minimize the current crisis. What I am doing is pointing out that modern civilization has weathered much, much worse. A pandemic today would have to claim about 86 million people to be as bad as the Spanish influenza. That's about the population of Germany or Iran.
A death rate like that nowadays would be an inconceivable tragedy. But in 1920 . . . not so much. Sure, the world had just come through World War I, and wartime controls on news may have limited how much people knew about the epidemic. But I've read a fair amount of literature from that era, both fiction and nonfiction, and it's kind of surprising how little attention the influenza got compared to the war itself. My collection of H.L. Mencken's writings doesn't touch on the flu; James Thurber references the Dutch Elm disease epidemic but not the Spanish Influenza. Hemingway, Graves, Isherwood — nothing that I can recall.
In historical fiction set in that era, written by later writers, there's likely to be mention of the terrible epidemic, and it may even claim a minor character or two. But at the time, writers just shrugged it off. And the world's economy pretty much shrugged it off, as well.
I have a few theories about why it wasn't such a big deal.
The Greater Trauma: I think that a lot of people at the time simply lumped the epidemic in with the Great War. After all, for all of recorded history up to that point, wars were invariably accompanied by plagues. World War I was something of a turning point in that more soldiers actually died of wounds than disease, but it was not a huge margin. So the epidemic and the battlefield deaths were all part of "The War" in most people's minds.
People Get Sick: It's also worth remembering how much more prevalent and deadly infectious diseases were, right up to the mid-20th Century. Epidemics may have been less widespread, but they could still generate shocking local death tolls. Germans in 1920 could remember the cholera outbreak of 1892, which took nearly 10,000 lives. Americans at the time might recall their grandparents talk of the cholera epidemic of the 1870s, which caused about 50,000 deaths.
And it's not as if the Spanish influenza was the only fatal disease around in 1920, either. People still died of typhus, smallpox, scarlet fever, yellow fever — and the undefeated historical grand champion killer, malaria.
For modern Americans (and increasingly for modern people all over the world), dying is something that happens to the very old, or to soldiers in wars. But for most of human history, right up to around the time I was born, people could die at any age. An epidemic with a death rate of one percent was just part of the "background noise." This leads to my final explanation.
We Care More: Medicine, nutrition, and sanitation have worked miracles in the past half century. Increasingly, people just don't die of infectious diseases. They die of old age, cancer, and violence. This is a wonderful thing, but it has encouraged a dangerous way of thinking. For most people nowadays, dying before you're in your seventies means it's somebody's fault. The product was defective, the pilot made an error, the driver was drunk. This is also why we often slide into victim-blaming when people get sick. He was obese. She smoked. He should have taken better care of himself. She should have stayed out of the sun. We have lost the easy fatalism of our ancestors. We don't want to think of death as a random event. We want it to be a solvable problem.
Hence the widespread paranoia about "toxins" in foods or consumer products making us sick. Hence the "anti-vaxxer" movement. Hence the anger about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. And hence the current omnidirectional finger-pointing and rage about COVID-19. I think there is some good in the view that illness is a problem to be solved, rather than something you just have to live with. But the problem with this virus is the virus. Not the people you already disagree with.
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