Daily Times

No disaster, war or calamity has pestered humans on this earth as much as viruses, bacteria and parasites that cause diseases. The plague of Justinian killed 50 million people of this planet in the 6th century. The plague that erupted in Europe between 1347 and 1357, and the subsequent wave of Black Death took the lives of 200 million people. The series of seven major cholera pandemic starting from 1817 has caused deaths to millions.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 in modern history provides us a comprehensive study-case as to how we humans should deal with a fast spreading pandemic. Also called influenza, it infected around 500 million people in the world, and almost 100 million people died because of the deadly disease.

As COVID-19 started spreading its fatal devastation across the countries, scientists and historians felt compelled to join their heads to study the outbreak of 1918, and apply the outcomes to restrain this novel coronavirus’s rampant impact. The first case of influenza was detected in Philadelphia on 17 September, 1918. The other day, the officials launched a campaign against coughing, spitting and sneezing in the public. When the pandemic kept spreading and infecting a good number of people, the officials were left with no option but to shut down schools, churches and public gathering spaces.

The first lesson learnt is that in the absence of vaccine, the first line of defense is the strict implementation of the modes of social distancing. It has always been hard to persuade people to remain indoors and stick to healthcare instructions. In 1918, a San Francisco health officer shot three people when they refused to wear mandatory face masks.

In 1918, a San Francisco health officer shot three people when they refused to wear mandatory face masks

Studies published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” reveal that the death rates during the 1918-20 pandemic were 50 percent lower in cities that acted in time and enforced strict measures of maintaining social distancing than those which acted upon the measures reluctantly and sluggishly.

There was also another angle to the pandemic. When the restriction over the outside movement and accumulation of the people was loosened, the cities relapsed into the infection rapidly. This is what happened in St. Louis where restrictions on public gatherings were lifted after two months, and city saw fresh rash of new cases. The cities which kept the curbs in place for some longer span did not experience the second wave of deaths.

All these findings impart great lessons to us – the curve can be flattened only through harsh measures of shoving the people behind the iron doors of their homes until some antidote or vaccine is discovered by someone busy in his laboratory for the weal of whole mankind gripped tightly by the menace of novel corona. Stephen S. Morse, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, rightly says, “The lessons of 1918, if well heeded, might help us to avoid repeating the same history today.”

One thing is clear here that notwithstanding travelling a long distance and reaping many laurels in the arena of medical science, humans this time, as ever, were not ready to combat a new infectious disease.

Many writers and analysts have been attempting to attract the attention of the world leaders as to what can happen if some pandemic, caused by some unknown virus, breaks out to play its havoc in the world. In 2017, the cover of ‘Time’ magazine carried the message: “Warning: the world is not ready for another pandemic”.

BBC ran a report in 2018 where experts were quoted to believe that a flu pandemic was only a matter of time. It was added that there were millions of undiscovered viruses in the world and the next pandemic would be caused by a novel virus.

In 2019, the US President Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services carried out a pandemic exercise named, “Crimson Contagion”. The exercise enacted an imagined scene of breaking out of a flu pandemic originating from China and thereafter disrupting the USA, and killing half a million people.

The sad part is when there were so many articles, white-papers and dissertations sending warnings that a novel disease can erupt, which may cause grave panic around the world, no serious efforts were made to battle with that.

Now the pandemic has broken out sending forth perilous signals around the globe. The tidings are alarming: total affected by Covid-19 are just close to one million, and more than 37 thousands have died.

Some contend that this is just the beginning. All the countries are affected. The human beings, for the first time ever in the history of mankind, have a common enemy, which has to be fought with as one group. Editorials and newsrooms have only one debate – how to grapple this common foe?

The doctors and scientists issue forth one message to all and sundry: go to hibernation, avoid nonessential travel and gatherings, be incarcerated within houses, and keep distance while conversing.

The victory of one nation will be the victory of all nations. The panacea to this disease to be discovered by somebody in some remote corner of this world shall be cheered by the other sitting on the other nook of the world. Common fight with shared ideology will bring collective triumph and relief for all. Fingers crossed.

The writer is an educationist and historian