The pandemic your grandparents forgot about | Hacker News Reader

The pandemic your grandparents forgot about

nautil.us

58 pointsPaulHoule67 comments

My grandparents didn't forget. In late February 2020 I brought up the topic of the novel coronavirus going around and they weren't overly worried because they'd gone through a respiratory pandemic or two before (there was another one in 1968).

I think covid will be more memorable, partly because it was more serious, but also because our reaction to it was much stronger, especially in some parts of the world. My understanding is that there were generally only minimal efforts at containing those flu pandemics. Incidentally, my grandparents also had time off school because of the polio epidemic.

That said, the Spanish flu, the last respiratory pandemic comparable to covid (actually, worse) isn't remembered well. I wouldn't be surprised if most people have heard of it only because of covid.

One of the problems with the Spanish flu was governments covered it up. It didn't start in Spain, Spain just had better freedom of the press and newspapers could talk about it. That's where it got the name.

Since there was minor dispute in Europe going at the time, one that went on from 1914 to 1918, it was not that Spanish Flu that was censored, it was all news in all beligerent countries that was censored concerning the war, including the flu.

But yes, that's how it got the name. Most likely, it started in the US, was carried to Europe by the US Army, spread across front lines on the Western Front, and from there across the globe.

Didn’t it start in Kansas, US?

That is the leading theory, but we don't have any real proof of it.

'minor'...

Sarcasm doesn't work too well on the internet, does it?

The time from 1914 to, say, 1919 or so was really hell on earth.

Given that I recognize your account I should have known better. But yes, sarcasm is hard.

On HN it does work surprisingly well! I might be wrong about that so...

... and I thought you were in on it and joining in. Some horrors are so bad that save for those gifted with eloquence, sarcasm and humor is all that we have to deal with them.

I may be biased but I've visited grave sites from WWI and WWII and for some reason that seems to rule out humor around those subjects. There is something very special about standing on an immaculate war grave with thousands of little crosses in very neat rows each one of them the only evidence that someone died there to ensure that we would have our freedoms.

This is a complicated subject for me because I did not want to go into the army on account of not wanting to be someone else's pawn in wars of aggression, which NL has been on the wrong side of more than once. At the same time I absolutely recognize the requirement to defend countries against evil and I'm eternally grateful to those that made sure that we have a relatively free life here. Hard to square the two, I have always kept my balance in there by telling myself that if push came to shove I'd be more than willing to act. The Russian war on Ukraine is testing that position in complex ways.

> I did not want to go into the army on account of not wanting to be someone else's pawn in wars of aggression

Sentiments mirrored. During my younger days I used to want to, not being part of the physical fight but a technological one. Then I saw exactly what you have put in words, how people's lives, there families lives, were used as "someone else's pawn" to feed their political ambitions.

Thanks for the sobering reminder.

Ultimately, I went for the physical fighting. Refused military service and tried myself at competitive combat sprts (not very successfully).

In the end, ignoring the rare cases were the initially baddoes (tm) are clearly known, in most cases poor, young folks are forced to kill each other by rich and powerful old folks while everyone else is suffering. The average soldiers on both sides usually have more in common with eavh other than they have with theor respective leadership. That being said, and paraphrasing one of the alt right election ads I see round here, peace may actually require as much dead people as necessary in case beligerents are inwilling to end the war early. Or not even start one in the first place.

We visited Verdun this year, including Forts Vaux and Doaumont. The athmosphere, including the beautiful forest, around the battle fields is special. And outright spooky in the partially flooded forts.

Totally different from the D-Day beaches. The outright slaughter on WW1 battlefields is just incomprehinsible, and it shows at places like Verdun.

I helped some people locate the grave sites of ancestors, not all is as documented as you would like it to be and there are quite a few mix-ups in names and DOB and so on (there shouldn't be, but that's the reality). This meant we visited multiple such sites in a very short period of time, and after the first couple it starts to really get to you: I could do this all day, every day of the year and never visit the same place twice.

In NL alone there are 3900 sites dedicated to WWII graves, ranging from single individuals, airplane crews (of planes that have never been dug up) all the way to grave sites so large that you can't see one end from the other. It is more than just a little impressive to see row after row with the names of people that came thousands of kilometers to die defending a country that they had otherwise probably never visited or would have never visited. In France and Belgium there are fewer such sites but they tend to be (much) larger, Lorraine in particular is impressive in the same way that a visit to a former concentration camp is.

It strikes me as that those poor guys that came here to liberate these countries would each and every one of them be absolutely horrified to see the state of affairs today, the degree to which we have betrayed them is something that we will never be able to wash off. The fact that the ultra-right is now exactly the thing they fought against and that it is the children of the beneficiaries of their sacrifice that are bringing this evil back into the world is what I find most horrifying. Really, I never really got the 'history repeats itself' thing at the gut level until I made that connection.

WWI is similarly impressive, but I don't have any family members that had that in living memory who are alive any more. But my grandmother lived through both of these, WWI did not impact as much here as WWII so I know far more of the first hand stories about WWII. But that doesn't mean that I'm unmoved by the history and seeing the remains of it (the grave sites and the 'no go' sites that are still too dangerous today) is formative. The 'Zone Rouges' are expected to be around for at least several more centuries...

Ukraine is headed there.

Kudos for doing that!

And I agree on the concentration camp visit, even if I'd say those places are even worse than military cemiteries. I only visited on so far, and that pretty recently, Dachau. Quite sobbering experience, and I only looked into the crematorium from the outside. And then you realize that Dachau was one of the better and less cruel camps the Nazis ran...

And yes, the right became what they fought: they supported the fight against the Nazis and oppossed the communist Soviets. Now they are supporting borderline fascist policies and Russia, oppose NATO (there are tons of stuff NATO did that deserve being opposed, but thise are not a problem for the right), and accept support from Putin...

My grandparents, both sides, lived actively through WW2 (soldiers, nurses and just young women teying to get along) in Germany. They never really talked about it, but it marked them. I never met my great-grand father who survived Verdun and some gas attacks in WW1 so. Overall, this period is still much closer than we think, too close maybe to be sure that we actually really passed it and wont go down that specific rabbit hole again.

Spain was not participating in WW I so there wasn't the same degree of censorship.

Off topic but in WW II a Swedish newspaper reported, without much detail, that the USA was definitely working on atomic bombs.

In fact the Spanish Flu is often considered to have begun in Kentucky; might as well call it the American Flu.

The most widely cited theory is that the 1918 influenza pandemic originated in Haskell County, Kansas in early 1918.

Some key details:

Haskell County is a rural county in southwest Kansas, about 300 miles west of Kansas City.

In January and February 1918, local newspapers reported an unusual flu-like illness spreading in the county. This pre-dated flu reports from other U.S. areas by several weeks.

Dr. Loring Miner, a physician in Haskell County, observed this early outbreak and alerted the U.S. Public Health Service. He described an unusual respiratory illness that was spreading rapidly, but milder than the flu pandemic strain that emerged later.

Haskell County residents were known to have traveled to Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas in February and March 1918. In March, Camp Funston reported a severe flu outbreak, followed by rapid spread of flu across the U.S. and globally over the following year.

Leading researchers like John Barry, author of "The Great Influenza", have concluded that the timing and pattern of these outbreaks strongly points to the virus originating in Haskell County and spreading from there to Camp Funston.

However, it's not definitive. Without viral samples and genetic sequencing from that era, the precise geographic origin cannot be proven. But the Haskell County theory provides the strongest evidence based on historical timelines and early outbreak patterns.

>might as well call it the American Flu

Ameriflu

> Ameriflu™ by Bayer®

FTFY

Never heard that. If it began in Kentucky where did it come from? There are lots of caves in Kentucky so bats again? They seem like a reservoir species for a lot of respiratory viruses in this family.

The 1918 influenza pandemic strain is suspected to have evolved in domestic swine and/or fowl, but it's impossible to be certain.

I always assumed that people knew a fair bit about the Spanish flu, but maybe that’s due to my family history. My great-grandparents died of the Spanish flu, leaving my one-year-old grandfather and his older siblings as orphans. His birth parents were Swedish immigrants, and he was adopted by an American family. The change in surname is a marker of the event that stays with the family every day.

> the Spanish flu, the last respiratory pandemic comparable to covid (actually, worse) isn't remembered well

Weird, I think the opposite: I learned about it in high school history class (in a gymnasium in Czechia, so maybe it's not commonly taught).

Mine didn't forget either. My grandmother almost died of it as a child. She was sent to a sick ward where patients were seen as a lost cause and not much care was provided. If you survived, good for you. Or if not, too bad but no surprise. She was there for a long time but eventually her body fought it off.

Also, all her hair fell out. Apparently this can happen with high fevers. When she went back to school, she wore a hat so she wouldn't get teased about her bald head.

I've heard of it because of the Squirrel Nut Zippers song La Grippe, which for a long time I (indirectly) supposed was about the Spanish Flu (https://americanahighways.org/2020/04/06/video-premiere-squi...):

  There's a flu bug getting passed around 
  Spreading like fire through this town
  There's a virus holing up inside us
  Each one that I know is coming down
  There's an Asian influenza 
  Infecting us all by the scores
  And it's turning into pneumonia 
  We must go out once more 
  There's a fool moon howling at the night 
  And each bark is much worse than each bite
  So we must go out and dance around 
  
  Yes we must go tonight 
  So the doctors came on the evening train
  With their flasks and their caskets and vials
  Mass psychosis was their diagnosis (yes)
  So we all cashed our checks and went wild 
  There's a fool moon howling at the night 
  And each bark is much worse than each bite
  So we must go out and dance around 
  Yes we must go tonight 
  La Grippe!, Salsa!

I think my parents told me about the 68 one, it was somewhere around 1970 to them, and in Sweden it was colloquially known as the "Hong Kong flu"[1].

What all this tells me is that if you study history you'll notice interesting patterns.

1. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongkonginfluensan

I think it's obvious that Asian countries will be the source of most epidemics because that's where most of the world lives.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next major epidemic comes from India, as that's the most populous country (though Indian's relatively large percentage of vegetarians and selective meat eaters should help prevent common infection patterns).

The Spanish flu (misleadingly named as it was first recorded in Kansas and only later reported in Europe) is kind of an outlier here, as was the Mexican swine flu.

> ... comes from India, as that's the second most populous country

Actually it's the most populous country now

You're right; I've edited my comment.

My grandfather lost his mother when he was 10, in 1919. Despite going deep into family history research for decades, and talking about so much of it with him before he passed at 97 almost 20 years ago, I only learned in 2021 that she died from the Spanish flu, offhandedly from a family member. What a strange black hole of recollection.

My great grandmother did remember the Spanish flu, though it was hazy gauzy fragmentary sorts of memories much like my remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall or the first gulf war. She was born in 1909, and I was asking her about it in 2001 or 2002.

Even in Soviet Russia, when things were so dire people used to die in scores for a multitude of reasons in a country that was defeated in WWI, ravaged by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary gangs of all sort, with epidemics of cholera, typhus, and multitude of other diseases running entirely unchecked due to complete collapse of all institutions of organised society, the Spanish flu is remembered. Not as a "worst thing ever" it was in the U.S., but it is remembered.

My great great Aunt told me about the Spanish Flu as a child - there was a family story that one of her relatives defied his family's requests not to go to a dance, and then brought it home with him resulting in the deaths of a few of them.

Interestingly, my great great grandfather's first wife died from the Spanish Flu, and he remarried in his 50's and had more children (my line), so if not for that pandemic, then I would presumably would not be here.

I was born after the polio epidemic and after the measles vaccine. But those things were still fresh in the minds of adults and teens.

I remember getting vaccinated in the school cafeteria for the Hong Cong Flu. Kid in front of me who was a peckerhead had a complete meltdown and had to be held down in a chair by a couple of public health nurses.

I'd say it'll also be more memorable because there's petabytes of fine grained data of people living through it. So even with decay over time, there should be more info on it that survives than from the Spanish Flu.

The Spanish Flu is well known where I live (Canada) - because WW1 is a largest part of our history curriculum.

I think a lot of really big historical events are "forgotten" like this because they're so well-known.

During the event itself, it's all anyone can talk about. After a few years of that, everyone knows everything they ever wanted to know about it and more. Due to over-saturation, eventually people get very bored of it.

10 or 20 or 30 years later, the subject rarely comes up because there's little practical need to discuss it. If a conversation does start, it doesn't last long. Even if someone has a story you haven't heard before, you have heard 100 others like it. It becomes almost a minor faux pas to mention it. You'll be seen as uninteresting.

So people growing up during this post-event period just don't hear much about it. It was a huge thing, but it's like it doesn't exist. If they do hear something about it and find it interesting, nobody is too excited about explaining anything or answering their questions. So you've got one generation that knows a ton about it, and the next generation picks up very little of it.

Hell, I feel like COVID barely comes up in conversation at all in my friend groups, even now. Only time it does is if someone we know gets it and has to miss out on some sort of gathering.

I think we're all just sick of talking about it or hearing about it.

It is amazing reading about past pandemics.

I thought all of the crazy conspiracy theories, and protest were a 'modern' phenomenon because of the internet.

But, All of the past pandemics had:

Conspiracy Theories.

People Not trusting doctors.

People saying we must trust doctors

Protest The Government

Protesting the Protestors

Quarantines where people loose touch, get depressed, drink, -- everything we saw.

THEN, it is also common to all past pandemics that people 'Forget' them. They fade away.

It seems to be another natural reaction, to forget the impact, it fades away.

> It seems to be another natural reaction, to forget the impact, it fades away.

I think this is pretty universal for a society, our collective memories are pretty short and highly influenced by the newest threat.

A perfect example of this is US law enforcement tracking of anti-government white supremacists in the 90s. After the OKC bombing, FBI dedicated significant resources to infiltrating and tracking white supremacist and extremist anti-government groups. Then 9/11 happened and the entire LEO and intelligence community put all of their weight into Islamist counterterrorism and they stopped tracking white supremacists altogether.

22 years have gone by and we’re just now starting to rededicate those resources back to white supremacy now that the movement is much more active.

I have a history book at home about the Plague. Re-reading that during Covid really drove the point home tgat as a society we are much less advanced than we love to believe. At least the people back in the 13-15th centuries, and before, had tue excuse of simply knowing jack shit about diseases, viruses, bacteria and the like. We on the other had none of those excuses.

Worse still: if there is another pandemic next year I would expect that to fare even worse than COVID because now all of the jackasses that were downplaying the last one will have the prevention paradox to give them even more ammo.

And just to think that we were very lucky that COVID did not have a slightly longer incubation time or a higher mortality, and that vaccine production went from a stand-still to overdrive as fast as it did. Lucky doesn't even begin to describe it.

Yeah, we were lucky. Because despite the first realistic shot at fighting a pandemic in history, we still kind of botched it. Bad enough even, that we still suffer the political fall-out all over the place.

There is still a sizable chunk of the population, polling in the double digits last I checked, that thinks COVID was a government hoax to take away their freedom. These people vote.

Oh yes, they do. And that is on top of the 15-20% in every western democracy that has no issue voting for wannabe fascist and totalitarians. The upcoming election cycles will be interesting to watch. And obviously vote in, hoping it kind of makes a difference.

It is seriously worrisome.

Perfect storms like this don't come around many times in a century and when they do you can have massive fall out. It's pretty weird how we are both on the cusp of massive progress and potentially a massive setback at the same time. I don't recall that being so prominently the case as long as I've been alive.

I don't remember anything like that neither, not that it means a lot but my chiodhood and youth was the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. It feels that democracies are more fragile now for a lot of reasons. The only historical, recent that is, that is comparable seem to be the 30s of the last century. Well, at least I don't wonder anymore how people like Hitler and Mussulini came to power.

Indeed, 'it can't happen here' is definitely answered in the negative. It can happen here, and it probably will happen here where 'here' is anywhere that considered itself to be on the 'good' side during WWII (that is: anywhere other than Japan, Italy and Germany). Italy is already almost there, the United States is flirting with it and may well succeed, the UK is up for grabs for whoever promises the electorate the biggest tax cuts and Russia is currently re-enacting the whole thing to see if they are able to determine if maybe Hitler was on to something.

It is absolutely incredible, the amount of lack of knowledge about history on display. And we can't seem to get the message across either. If Trump should - god forbid - come to power I predict all out war in Europe within the next 6 years.

If Trump wins, he will be president for lif, as will be maybe Ivanka (with the blessing of the GOP) later. That will mean the potential end of liberal democracies in the West. And yes, unless the war in Ukraine is over by then, even a potential land war in Europe, again.

And depending how that goes, who knows what China will be up to regarding Taiwan. Or Indi and Pakistan, once the stops are pulled, it will only be downhill. Or not, part of me still has hope. Not a lot, but still.

Trump makes a lot of promises, but he doesn't follow through very well. He tried to end democracy last time and fell flat on his face. He might even be prosecuted for the crimes he committed in the process. The system does still work, at least for now.

That ice is too thin for my taste. It came bloody close. Much closer than it had a right to. Mike Pence should get some kind of medal, I absolutely abhor his politics but to stand straight in the face of that much pressure is heroic at some level.

Good thing there wasn't such a thing as a BSL-4 lab then in Kansas...

For sure there would have been a 'lab-leak' theory to go with it.

Who remembers the polio pandemic of 1952? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polio

I was born much later but it was still around and it was common to know kids that could not walk. It was the time when a vaccine became mandatory in my country.

What I didn't know back then was that there was a pandemic many years before. I thought that it was an illness like all the ones that children got and lived through, smallpox and more, except that this one was not around anymore.

The difference for the young me was in the oral transmission of knowledge: for some reason I was told about the Spanish flu and not about polio.

* https://archive.ph/1vtiM

* https://archive.today/1vtiM

One of the more harrowing accounts of 1918 is the famous short story by John O'Hara called The Doctor's Son, about a teenage boy driving a country doctor around during the 1918 flu. We got off easy: https://archive.org/details/collectedstories0000ohar

most people don't seem to remember the asian flu epidemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa... which i do remember, caught the flu, and lived through it.

perhaps in 50 years or so, people will be making similar posts regarding covid?

In 1957 the March of Dimes had just immunized most Americans for polio. Bowling alleys and swimming pools were reopened. Kids were all playing outside again (as they used to in ancient times). Life was notably back to normal.

It was a forgettable flu epidemic.

> it would kill 116,000 people in the United States (the equivalent of about 232,000 today)

How is that measured? By population size?

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