For 102 years, influenza scholars and infectious disease experts have attempted to educate the masses in hopes of preventing future pandemics. And yet, here we are.
To be clear, the coronavirus at fault for the current pandemic isn’t a flu virus. And yet the 1918 and 2020 pandemics share similarities in terms of their basis on a novel, formidable virus that took the world and every aspect of society by storm. To learn the lessons of the 1918 flu, the missteps we’ve taken since and our post-pandemic future, CNN spoke with three experts on the subject.
These conversations have been edited and condensed for clarity.
CNN: What are the lessons of the 1918 pandemic?
What happened was another spike in San Francisco in influenza cases in early 1919, and they went back to wearing masks. The message is, perhaps, that things are not as novel as they might seem, and that human behavior in response to pandemics of this magnitude is actually fairly predictable.
Gina Kolata: Even though we know exactly what the 1918 virus looks like, we still don’t know why it was so deadly.
CNN: Experts on 1918 and infectious diseases have stressed heeding history to prevent future pandemics. Where do you think we’ve gone wrong since the 1918 flu?
Brown: We have to be very careful saying, “Well, it was obvious, do this, do that.” But I think it was fairly clear that the next pandemic threat was going to be a virus and not a bacteria, fungus or parasite. Most people thought that it would be an influenza pandemic, and I was one of them.
Unfortunately, we know that funding for these things comes in waves. Funding money is allotted based on essentially what’s going on today. There’s very little attention paid to what may happen down the road, and we’ve become complacent with our belief that we have the ability to control everything. We’re all subject to the great extremes of weather but also nature.
Had we kept the pandemic planning front and center, then we would, I think, have been in a much, much better place. But each year that you fund pandemic planning, you’re saying no to funding something else. When there is no pandemic on the horizon, it’s very easy to say, “Why don’t we take these many millions of dollars and put them into curing Alzheimer’s disease?”
CNN: How did the 1918 pandemic eventually end, and how do you think the current pandemic will subside?
Brown: The 1918 influenza petered out toward the beginning of 1919. Today, the influenza viruses that circulate include a descendant of that initial 1918 H1N1 virus. So we are actually exposed to a descendant of that initial pandemic.
We’ve seen those three effects through history in 1918, and we will see some variant of that today. There’s no doubt that we will see an end to Covid-19. The big question is, what will be the cost and when will that be?
CNN: Given what you know about the 1918 flu, what are you particularly worried about right now?
CNN: Is there anything about the current pandemic that gives you hope?
Brown: First of all, people seem to get back to normality very quickly. Now I think that’s because infectious disease was such a common occurrence at the turn of the century — we had no vaccines against diphtheria, measles, hepatitis or meningitis, so waves of these diseases were very common in Europe and the United States. People have been dealing with infectious diseases in their lives for centuries. In 1918, they bounced back relatively quickly.
Kolata: Societies have somehow come through, recovered and survived some pretty horrible pandemics in the past that were much worse than we’re going through now. Now, at least, we have a chance of getting a vaccine that might actually stop this virus before it runs through the entire population and affects everybody that could be affected. So, I have some hope.