The flood of ignorance coming from government leaders, the media, and social media is maddening. The world has suffered from and survived global pandemics before. The last one like 2020’s was just 102 years ago, in 1918.
That pandemic’s infection rate was “flattened” in some cities, with social distancing and lockdowns just as we’re doing now. So while it seems that ignorance is ruling the day, there are enough people who have learned from history or at last ingrained those lessons in common knowledge.
But then comes the next conversation, how and when to restart the economy. How was that done back in 1918? How and where was it done well, and how and when did it cause second waves of preventable infections? Rather than experiment with human lives, take a moment to look back in time and see what was tried before and learn from those mistakes and successes.
NPR’s The Indicator did that today.