The global response to combating Covid-19 has been unprecedented, with governments shutting down non-essential businesses and warning people to wear masks, social distance and self-quarantine. It could permanently change how people work, play and school.
The pandemic also is likely to spark an increase in people seeking careers in virology and immunology.
Communicable diseases are scary things. Some of the terrible diseases my parents grew up worrying about like smallpox and polio have been vanquished by medical advances. Others like measles are making a comeback thanks to the irrational anti-vaccination movement.
My maternal grandfather, William O. Kelly, had polio as a young man. He had to learn how to walk again. He eventually recovered, got married and fathered my mother. Thank God for that!
Covid-19 caught governments unprepared even though we have had warnings for years. Most recently there was the swine flu pandemic that killed 200,000 in 2009-10.
But the outbreak most historians point to is the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The worldwide death toll from the Spanish flu is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million.
Meanwhile, few Americans know about the Asian flu pandemic in 1957-58 that killed 1.1 million worldwide, including 116,000 in the U.S. That’s likely because the U.S. was ready with a vaccine before that strain of the flu hit here.
My mother, who’s now 87 years old, doesn’t recall that flu outbreak. At the time, she was raising two young children in Madison, Wis., while her husband and my to-be father was getting his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.
“It didn’t impact us at all. I don’t even remember it,” she said recently. “Everything is so different now because of the kind of media we have. Something happens and five minutes later it’s on the news.”
And air travel wasn’t as prevalent in the late 1950s either. That helped spread Covid-19 so rapidly worldwide.
I was born in 1962 and remember certain diseases scaring me. I saw a movie or TV drama series episode about a man spreading diphtheria in a big city that shook me. I also was frightened of leprosy after watching an epic Bible movie.
I recall staying home from elementary school when I was sick with the mumps.
I also was among the last U.S. elementary school classes to get the smallpox vaccine. I still have the scar on my upper left arm from the booster shot. Routine vaccinations for smallpox were discontinued in 1972 in the U.S. I can remember kids lining up in the gym to get their shot. Quite a few cried after getting it. Not me, but it did sting.
Unlike my older siblings, I didn’t get the measles or chickenpox.
“We had both the chickenpox and red measles around the same time,” my mother said. “One followed the other. I don’t remember which came first. One of dad’s friends or coworkers, his wife said to him, ‘Boy, Alice really got a double dose having them both together like that.’”
My siblings were confined to the house for about two weeks when they were sick with the measles and chickenpox in the late 1960s.
“I remember them all upstairs in our house in Royal Oak,” Michigan, she said. “I had three beds up there and that’s where they were. I had had it as a child, so I was immune.”
Related reading:
Visualizing the History of Pandemics (Visual Capitalist; March 14, 2020, and updated April 18, 2020)
How the 1957 Flu Pandemic Was Stopped Early in Its Path (History; March 18, 2020)
How Will Coronavirus Pandemic Deaths Compare to the 1957 Flu Pandemic? (Reason; March 31, 2020)
Photo: Covid-19 coronavirus (CDC image)
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