148. 1918

Frustration is setting in, and the more we go, the more we look like 1918.

In 1918 there was a war—and we have several. They had refugees and crowds, and so do we. They had flu deniers, and so do we. They wanted to get on with life, and so do we.

In 1918, the influenza virus attacked young adults in the prime of life. Soldiers, crowded on trains, in barracks and in trenches, were the virus’s perfect vectors. It could take its time and travel aboard ship across the ocean, through the barracks and trenches, and work its way to the far corners of the world over a period of two and three years. 

Health care people and systems worked hard to contain it. They closed churches and public meeting places, advised masks, tried to puzzle a vaccine. They fought to identify it, thought at first it was a bacteria, worked to sort its impacts from those of pneumonia, saw that it often moved to that more familiar disease. Some of today’s pneumonia talk—claims that it is not the Covid that kills, that a lot of deaths attributed to it are actually other things—sounds similar.

Scientists and historians debated at the time and for decades after on its origins and means of arrival in human hosts. Like our Covid, it probably started with a flier—most likely ducks in the American Midwest. The resolution of the mystery was quietly carried on by a few scientists while the virus itself raged. Like the fight over China and the potential of lab origins that sometimes finds voice today.

History says that these viruses, from Medieval plagues to AIDS to Covid, don’t care what we think; they make their own ways in the world, oftentimes booming and subsiding, but rarely, without massive human intervention like we had with smallpox and are trying to do with polio, going away completely. They mutate and hide in small places, small populations, waiting for another chance to surge. They use up a crowd, then slow until another crowd emerges. 

In 1918, in San Francisco, it was the Armistice in November and the Christmas shopping season—and fatigue—that once again crowded churches and stores without the masks they’d carefully worn only months before. 

Unlike the slow and workmanlike Influenza virus of 1918, Covid has to dodge vaccines and testing and tracking. But it gets to travel on faster planes in a more crowded earth.

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