March 29, 2024

Doran: History repeats itself century later

“What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history,” Warren Buffet said.

Webinars and podcasts have pretty much dominated my time since mid-March. They have been useful and very valuable tools to provide us with the latest information. We all miss those meetings and field days, but it is what it is.

The webinar that really impacted me, and I still often think about, was the one in May hosted by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, featuring David Wheelock, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank vice president, and Sam Fiorello, Cortex Innovation Community CEO and AgTech NEXT External Advisory board chair.

“Pandemic economics, a conversation about the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic and its modern-day implications” was the title of the webinar.

Part of the webinar focused on the research of Stephan Luck, Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group economist; Sergio Correia, Federal Reserve System Board of Governors economist; and Emil Verner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management assistant professor of finance.

In general, the pandemic had a pattern of spread and the nation’s reactions paralleled what we’ve been seeing in 2020.

There were three different waves of illness during the influenza pandemic, starting in March 1918 and subsiding by summer of 1919. The pandemic peaked in the United States during the second wave in the fall of 1918. This highly fatal second wave was responsible for most of the U.S. deaths attributed to the pandemic.

“It is estimated that about 500 million people, or one-third of the world’s population, became infected with the virus, leading to at least 50 million deaths worldwide, with 550,000 to 675,000 occurring in the United States. The pandemic thus killed about 0.66% of the U.S. population and, in particular, resulted in high death rates for young and healthy adults,” between 18 and 44 years old, the study found.

As with COVID-19, there was no vaccine for the influenza 100 years ago, so lowering the curve of its spread hinged solely on non-pharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs, including social distancing. And, like today, efforts to control social interaction were all over the place.

A difference between then and now is 100 years ago it was up to local city health commissioners, not politicians, to set policies for battling the disease.

NPIs implemented in 1918 resemble many of the policies used to reduce the spread of COVID-19, including closures of schools, theaters and churches, bans on public gatherings and funerals, quarantines of suspected cases and restrictions on business hours. There was then, as now, pressure to reopen those places as time progressed.

The webinar panelists used St. Louis and Philadelphia as examples of who city health commissioner rulings impacted the flu’s spread.

Wheelock showed data from the flu pandemic that focuses on the number of deaths per 100,000 in Philadelphia and St. Louis during the second wave, and most deadly wave, that began in the fall of 1818.

Philadelphia was slow to take mitigation measures and had a big surge of cases. The city allowed a large World War I Liberty Loans parade that fall. The parade was organized to promote government bonds to help pay for the needs of the Allied troops in World War I.

More than 200,000 Philadelphians attended the parade. That led to a tremendous spike in cases, one of the worst death rates in all of the cities in the United States. There were 748 deaths per 100,000 when it peaked.

On the other hand, St. Louis took a more aggressive line. As soon as cases started to appear in early October 1918, the city health commissioner lobbied to not have a parade in St. Louis and also close schools and take other mitigating measures. St. Louis had a much flatter curve and was more successful containing the virus, averaging 358 deaths per 100,000.

“Most pandemics come in waves. Because it was an influenza virus, there tended to be a flattening over the summer months, then there was a very large second wave in the fall with a spike in cases and mortality that lasted into the early part of 1919 and then there was a third wave in the spring of 1919,” Fiorello said in the webinar.

“If we learn anything from the influenza in 1918-1919 is that it’s not like you go through a tough period, hunker down and things end. These things will play out over a series of waves. This one had three; others have had four and five waves.”

There are some differences between the pandemic of today and a century ago. Back then we didn’t have morons spreading false information and conspiracy theories about the disease on the internet, and wearing masks wasn’t political.

God help us.