‘Pale Rider’ offers perspective on COVID-19
By M. Clare Haefner
It could be so much worse.
That’s what I think every time I turn on the news to hear the latest updates on the COVID-19 pandemic. For all the things we could have done better to slow the spread of this novel virus in the past six months, it could have been worse. It could have been another Spanish flu.
Growing up, I remember hearing stories from relatives, reading books and writing papers about World War I. The Great War killed an estimated 17 million people, but I learned little about an even greater killer circumnavigating the globe at the same time—the Spanish flu. Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (Public Affairs, 2017) filled in the gaps and gave me insight into what could be the greatest pandemic the world has ever known.
Nearly one-third of the population caught the flu between March 1918 and March 1920 as it swept the globe in three waves, killing between 50 and 100 million people. The death toll could be even higher because this flu, which despite its name did not start in Spain, had respiratory symptoms similar to other fatal illnesses collectively referred to as “plagues” by people who did not have means of identifying the virus. It was certainly “the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history,” Spinney writes in the book’s introduction.
Hippocrates was among the first to define the term epidemic, but it evolved over time as scientists and doctors learned to distinguish between symptoms and separate diseases. Many of the earliest epidemics, like those cited in the third century BC, were likely not caused by a single disease, but rather a collection of them hitting a region at the same time. It was the Middle Ages before epidemics were associated with a single microbe causing disease, Spinney explains.
She begins Pale Rider with a brief history of disease filled with interesting facts, including that influenza was likely the disease Christopher Columbus brought with him to the Americas in 1492, and that an epidemic in 1557 claimed more British lives—6 percent of the population—than “Bloody” Queen Mary had executed during her short reign.
Throughout history, disease has killed far more people than war and has reshaped the world in even greater, though often more personal, ways. It is perhaps the personal effects of a pandemic that keep it from our collective memory in the way that wars are remembered.
Yet the impacts are undeniable. Spanish flu likely turned the tide of World War I in the Allies favor, though the war also contributed to its spread as soldiers returned home from battlefields hard hit by disease. Its lasting effects and the generation of people it changed likely gave rise to the political movements that led to World War II.
Despite this fascinating history of Spanish flu and other global pandemics that Spinney expertly relates, I was drawn to Pale Rider seeking a greater understanding of the invisible killer we’re waging battle with today. How do pandemics start, why didn’t we see COVID-19 coming, and could we have done more to prevent the spread of this novel virus? I’ve been seeking answers to these questions for months, and since history repeats itself, I hoped to learn something from the Spanish flu and its progression around the world.
Many epidemiologists saw COVID-19 coming, at least in vague terms. They knew it was only a matter of time before another flu strain crossed from animals to humans (birds are the most common incubator of influenza). And Spinney posits that the greatest lesson the Spanish flu can teach us is that “another flu pandemic is inevitable, but whether it kills 10 million or 100 million will be determined by the world into which it emerges.”
Thankfully, the coronavirus has emerged in a world better prepared than the one that lived through the Spanish flu.
Outbreaks of Ebola and SARS, combined with scientific, technological and medical advances, helped shape the response and preparedness for another pandemic that has saved lives in 2020. We’ve been tested and will likely learn over the coming months and years what we could have done better to slow the spread of COVID-19. But this pandemic, like the Spanish flu, will be contained. Scientists will find a treatment and a vaccine that prevents its spread, but it has and will continue to reshape our world—though how it remakes us long term remains to be seen.
