Why we don’t remember the 1918 pandemic

I was listening to Chris Hayes's podcast the other day when he had on John Barry as his guest. Barry wrote 'The Great Influenza,” a book that I've written about before on these very pages, on the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed some 50 million people around the world.

Hayes asked Barry a question I've had since I began reading his book last year, and that was why the Great Influenza left such a small cultural footprint despite being so destructive. In other words, there are so few books, plays and movies that tell this particular story. Everyone knows about World War I, which was happening at the same time, but few people had heard of the Great Influenza until this year when journalists began comparing it to the present COVID-19 pandemic.

Barry had a few theories as to why the Great Influenza did not stick in the collective consciousness, such as the fact that people like to forget painful events. But the theory that I feel really hits the mark was Barry's suggestion that we like stories about what people do to people, not what nature does to people. A virus just isn't a good antagonist. We prefer stories where good defeats evil, where heroes are made on the battlefield bravely fighting tyranny. But in the case of a pandemic, the heroes aren't fighting other humans. In fact, they're not really 'fighting” at all. They're the doctors and nurses risking their lives caring for the sick. Or they're the medical scientists working around the clock on a vaccine.

The other thing I wanted to say about the coronavirus is that it looks like two currents are headed for a collision course. On the one hand, the political will to maintain these shelter-in-place orders across the country seems to be fraying. We're seeing a number of states, Iowa included, already taking steps to return to a sense of normalcy with the reopening of fitness centers, restaurants and farmers markets, albeit with a number of restrictions. I can understand the desire to do this. After all, the lockdown is taking a toll on the economy, and the number of people out of work has exploded in the past two months to a level not seen since the Great Depression.

This desire to reopen the economy is one current, and it's going to crash against another current which is that the coronavirus may be both more deadly and more ubiquitous than we thought. The Washington Post published a story in late April showing that coronavirus deaths might be grossly undercounted because the number of 'excess deaths,” the number of deaths above what would be expected during this time of year, was 15,000 higher in the first few weeks of the pandemic than the official COVID-19 death tally. It could be that people are dying of COVID-19 without being tested, or perhaps people are dying because they're avoiding going to the hospital. The other thing to keep in mind is that we are just now learning about some major COVID-19 hot spots, like the fact that over 700 employees of the meat-packing plant in Perry, Iowa, have tested positive for the virus.

We might be losing interest in the virus, but the virus is still very interested in us.