The big difference between the 1918 Influenza and our Covid-19 can be said in a word: speed. The speeds with which news travels, medicine develops, and people and the virus we carry move.
Here in Wallowa County we’d about settled in for a long winter’s nap, watching the snow fall from the sky and drift across our roads and yards. Some of us had tried to wash off the old year in New Year’s Day’s polar plunge in Wallowa Lake—while others vowed they’d never go in that lake in mid-summer.
We were finding routines, working from home again, but this time because it was too damned windy to go out and our cars might have blown off the road or been covered by a snowplow’s shower. When we woke from that January 2 storm and went to stores for milk and bread, we wore our masks or we did not. Those of us who are mask wearers put them on and off like a pair of mittens as we go in and out of stores. The unmasked don’t heckle us and we don’t heckle them. It’s a kind of standoff—although I know there is muttering from our side that the unmasked and unvaccinated should pay their own hospital bills when the Covid hit sthem, and I imagine the anti-vaxxers and maskers chuckle or fume quietly about our silliness.
And then what? A month ago we hear about this new strain of the Covid that is faster than its predecessors, and that it seems to move right through the vaccinated. Yes, the second and third paragraphs in the news stories opine that the vaccinated suffer less and are hospitalized less frequently, and Dr. Fauci bravely takes the TV mike to say once again that our best defense is vaccinating the unvaccinated and wearing our masks. It is wearying.
And then yesterday, January 4, Covid explodes in Oregon, with 4540 new cases, and over 500 hospitalized. And we learn that a friend brought Covid back from a California holiday and another tested positive on returning from Arizona. And the news carries new warnings and directions on testing and quarantining and isolating (and what is the one and what the other?).
We’re well into the second year of this disease, and the second or third or fourth wave, depending on who is counting and where.
A quick look back at 1918 shows an eerily similar trajectory. Mostly by train and troopship, the 1918 influenza circled the globe in 3 or 4 waves and infected some 500 million, a third of the world’s population. It killed 675,000 Americans when our population was 110 million. It petered out with less virulent outbreaks about two years after it started.
We have vaccines—and we have airplanes and personal vehicles that allow us to go anywhere, and fast. Speed seems to be cancelling the advantages of vaccines, and if 1918-1920 patterns continue, the current omicron version will take its toll and play out in a few more weeks or months. Vaccinations and infections will continue to rise, but with luck, and following the path of its 1918 cousin, the Covid will mutate or wind down, and take its place alongside seasonal flu. Sometime in late 2022 or early 2023.
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