The Great Influenza by John M. Barry
My Takeaways
- Very few things about the COVID-19 pandemic are actually “unprecedented”.
- Up until the late 1800s, humanity had never cured any disease. Scientists went into the 1918 Pandemic with the newfound revelation that they could go head-to-head with nature’s pestilence and maybe win. This is something I took completely for granted when COVID-19 broke out.
- The low estimate for the number of deaths worldwide in the 1918 pandemic is 21 million. Adjusted for population, that would be 73 million deaths today. As of today, the number of COVID-19 deaths worldwide is less than 5 million.
Should you read it?
Don’t bother. This book was so poorly written and edited that you’ll be better off reading the Influenza and Spanish Flu Wikipedia articles. Many people (including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe) disagree with me and call it “masterful” and “brilliant.” But the narrative was wandering, the editing poor, and the scientific sections a hodgepodge of copy-pasted facts.
For a book about a global pandemic, its main focus is on how the flu impacted the U.S. military. The impact to civilians is mostly contained in a bulleted list of quotations from random people. The global nature of the pandemic is almost entirely glossed over, as are the non-medical impacts on society (eg, reactions to public health orders, economic impact, etc.)
The Precedent for our Unprecedented Times
Throughout 2020, we constantly heard about “these unprecedented times.” The best part of this book (and there weren’t many) was learning how “these unprecedented times” are really nothing new. In fact, as far as pandemics go, this one was pretty normal.
Here’s my summary of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic based on this book (written in 2004):
A virus attacking the respiratory system breaks out, killing thousands all over the world in a short amount of time. Although most people recover on their own, there are enough serious cases that hospitals are overrun, and the dead can’t be buried quickly enough. Emergency rooms pack people into every nook and cranny, and doctors and nurses are completely overwhelmed by death after death after death.
Some local governments, like San Francisco, enforce mask mandates, close churches, schools, restaurants, and other public spaces. Other local governments don’t do anything and fare worse. The response at the federal level is mixed: The president (who eventually contracts the virus) comes into direct conflict with his medical advisors when he doesn’t acknowledge the severity of the disease. The president’s response is mirrored by many others who insist that it’s no big deal, “it’s just the flu”. People blame foreign countries for bringing it to America while some try to stave off the virus by taking anti-malarial drugs and injecting themselves with bleach.
A spirit of fear pervades. Trust erodes between neighbors, and no one trusts the government to do the right thing.
Sound familiar?
In 1918, lots of ineffective vaccines were distributed that targeted the wrong microorganism. The actual virus that caused influenza wasn’t discovered until years later, and a vaccine wasn’t discovered until 1931, long after the pandemic had ended naturally. On the other hand, within months of the COVID-19 outbreak, we had sequenced the genome of the virus and started development on a vaccine that was probably going to work. That is actually unprecedented.
Long lines, mask mandates, unrest, and quarantines? Not so much.