Looking Forward by Looking Back: Global Pandemic II

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.

Two years into this global pandemic, many misguided people are still comparing Covid-19 to influenza. 1,600 death in a week in 2018 was tragic, but those influenza spikes are barely visible when compared to the tragic scale of Covid-19, and even more so given a simple cloth mask and vaccines that prevent most deaths. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on...

Two years ago was the first known case of Covid-19 in a human being. That makes this week a very unhappy anniversary, one that we’re likely to “celebrate” for quite a few more years before this pandemic is finally history. Looking back at the 5+ million lives lost so far, despite those losses and despite the historically fast rollout of vaccines, the overall trend of cases is...

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed at least 25 million people globally. Here in the United States 675,000 people are known to have died from that massive outbreak of flu. As of this last week (middle of September 2021), more people have died of Covid-19 in this pandemic. 682,000 as of today, with another 2,000 Americans dying every single day. While 675,000 is the population of a city and...

If only people looked back into history to learn from past mistakes, the masses would stop repeating so many past mistakes. Here in 2021, it’s the ideas that vaccines are worse than the disease and that vaccines take away one’s freedom. This long tweet stream tells the story better than I could (emphasis is mine, unrolled into text and images to make it easier to read): This is a good...

Back in March 2020, when the first lockdowns hit, The Hammer and the Dance was published on Medium predicting the future of the pandemic. This is a great piece of analysis. Unfortunately, like my predictions written way back then, this author had an assumption that proved false. Specifically, that people would prioritize life. That people would behave so that the fewest number of people would die...