The centenary of the 20th century’s worst catastrophe, the Spanish flu | Hacker News Reader

The centenary of the 20th century’s worst catastrophe, the Spanish flu

economist.com

55 pointssohkamyung23 comments

I wonder if a discussion around Spanish Flu should also include the 1956-58 Asian Flu as well as the 1968-69 Hong Kong Flu?

Would the much more open travel of today, compared to the far more closed international travel of yesterday have had a significant impact on virality and mortality of those two more recent pandemics?

I’ve sat in on a meeting in the post Tamiflu/bird flu scare environment that provided a macro view of the challenges facing a small country like New Zealand.

My thoughts are that a financial hedge against a pandemic might include:

Going “long” tele-presence such as Zoom, Skype, etc as well as streaming entertainment.

Going “short” passenger airlines, lifestyle retail, and shopping mall REITs.

As far as global/macro risks go, pandemic is top of mind for me.

I perceive pandemic as a lower risk and likelihood than another global financial shock.

But I view them both as ultimately inevitable.

It’s just a question of severity for both.

But Imthinkmthe difference is that another GFC would not precipitate a pandemic.

But a pandemic could precipitate a GFC.

> But a pandemic could precipitate a GFC.

I dont see why. Some industries would suffer, but others would prosper. It would not be a whole-encompassing GFC like when the banks derail.

A pandemic with casualty rates comparable to the Spanish Flu would mean a rapid worldwide GDP drop comparable to a GFC simply because even if the GDP-per-capita would stay the same, there would be less people, so a drop in both production and demand. It would also mean an immediate jump in household default rates as a noticeable portion of families lose their main earners. Both of these factors are likely to cause banks to derail as well.

One problem will be the media crying wolf every year, anytime there is a minor disease spreading. Bird flu, swine flu, ebola, mad cow disease, etc. All of which have a tiny death toll, dwarfed by even the common flu. But every time we are told this is the end of the world, everyone should be scared. As a result I think people progressively ignore these warnings.

http://archive.is/7aEug

https://outline.com/3Yndgb

Hero

Extra credits has a series about this pandemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ9WX4qVxEo

The most rollicking fun song about the Flupandemic ever made was by the Flying Fish Sailors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV938U4Y96w Not to be missed, if you're interested in the topic and don't mind lighthearted songs about widespread death.

I think it was "Adam Ruins Everything" that pointed out that that flu basically killed everyone it could i.e. except for those that were resistant, it killed until it ran out of people to infect. Scary.

We Heard the Bells: The Influenza of 1918, a documentary from the Health Department

https://archive.org/details/gov.hhs.cms.006719

Buy NIOSH-approved N95 particulate respirator masks. They're like $2/per on Amazon.

Make sure they fit you, and your family. Get different types / sizes.

You won't be able to buy them -- anywhere -- once media organizations start reporting on an outbreak.

Don't tell anyone you have them.

Ignore people who don't think this is worth worrying about. People are stupid.

I wouldn’t trust my life to a respirator mask I bought from Amazon. How would I know I didn’t get a fake?

It has NIOSH approval printed right on it. Or, at least, written in crayon.

Aye. I now assume "Fulfilled by Amazon" means there's a real chance of counterfeit. If getting the real thing matters, I take my custom elsewhere.

If you want to be sure the mask fits correctly you can simulate the procedure here which is basically wearing the mask with a larger plastic bag/enclosure over you and having some spray a aerosolized bitter compound in the air around your head [pdf]: http://www.kdheks.gov/cphp/download/Fit_Test_Pro_for_N95_R.p...

This is how you get fit tested in hospitals. I'll also add that n95 masks are considered overkill for influenza (but not SARS, TB, measles, varicella aka chickenpox).

Also, get your flu shot every year! Even if it isn't optimized against the antigens on this years virus it is like a brick in a wall your immune system builds up over time against a variety of influenza variations.

Additional benefit from wearing mask is that it prevents you from touching your face.

Touching with the mouth, eyes, and/or nostrils with your contaminated hand is substantial source of respiratory virus infections.

People touch their face an average of 3 - 4 times per hour, and common objects an average of 3 times per hour. In some kind of sitting office work it can be 10-15 times per hour.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18357546

Would you please stop creating accounts for every comment or two you post? This is in the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need to have some consistent identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community at all, and that would be a very different kind of forum. There are legit uses for throwaways, just not routinely. Lots more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Algolia: "No stories matching by:dang community identity"

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Dan clearly made some sort of typo in that URL.

Apparently anything can - and most often will - attract downvotes here. Not only controversial or negatively framed or opinionated or poorly stated or patently incorrect comments, but plain, simple, incontrovertible statements of fact as my Algolia one above.

To the extent that I sometimes wonder if someone out there is going a bit too systematically about it.

Whoops - fixed now.

(I made a change to the HN moderation software that caused it to start escaping characters it shouldn't, and haven't fixed the bug yet.)

I lived in heavy pollution this summer due to forrest fires. I bought N95s and wore them walking around town. Totally annoying, looked weird although I wasn't the only one doing it, sweaty, but they did help.

The one thing I realized quickly was that I could not take the mask off without completely f-ing up the sterile field created by the mask. Outside of the mask smeared all over my face, outside of the mask hitting me in the eye as my glasses got hung up, etc.

If you can't doff an N95 correctly, keeping the exterior of the mask from your hand, facial skin, and mucous membranes, they won't actually block anything viral or bacterial.

Gave me a whole additional level of appreciation for the doctors and medical professionals working with Ebola patients couple years back and a greater understanding of why they fell ill despite what seemed to be bulletproof PPE.

Not being able to buy a necessity gets you in a scary and impotent situation. I’ve seen that twice in my city, the first one was when an unusual cold winter arrived, temperatures went down to -25 Celsius, maybe that doesn’t sound as much for people who live in cold places, but for my city in Northern Mexico that was amazingly cold. Our infrastructure colapsed, electricity went down, internet and cellphone antennas went down with it, there was LP shortage, old trees died, few people had running water since a lot of pipes were broken. And since everyone was trying to fix their pipes at the same time there was a shortage of tubes and consumables, people spent days and weeks without water.

The second time in 2009 with H1N1’s outbreak, we ran out of masks in a couple of hours.

Situations like that made me realize how vulnerable our societies can be in big events.

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