April 1, 2020
With masks over their faces, members of the American Red Cross remove a victim of the Spanish Flu in 1918 from a house in St. Louis, Missouri. (Uncredited photo / public domain)
Rochester alumnus and historian John Barry ’69 (MA) has been much in the news this spring. The author of the award-winning 2004 book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, Barry has shared insights on similarities and differences between the 1918 influenza pandemic and the 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic.
In guest essays in the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and in appearances on CBS News and other national outlets, he has made several key points:
- The most important lesson from the 1918 pandemic is “to tell the truth.” Faced with concern about wartime morale in 1918, warnings by doctors in Philadelphia to cancel a planned war bond parade were never printed. The parade went ahead, and in 48 hours, Philadelphia became an epicenter of the illness with an eventual death toll of 14,500.
- Restrictions designed to impose social distancing may have to be repeated. Barry wrote in the New York Times that even with influenza’s much shorter incubation period, many cities in 1918 “imposed restrictions, lifted them too soon, then reimposed them.”
- The long-term course of COVID-19 is yet to be understood. Barry noted that the 1918 influenza pandemic didn’t end until 1920. One reason was that people began to develop immunity. Another reason was that the virus mutated in ways that made it less lethal. How novel coronavirus will behave is unknown.