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Writing the History of Pandemics in the Age of COVID-19
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Peter Baldwin, Fighting the First Wave: Why the Coronavirus Was Tackled So Differently across the Globe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, £20.00). Pp. viii + 385. isbn978 1 3165 1833 5.
John Fabian Witt, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020, £12.99). Pp. x + 174. isbn978 0 3002 5727 4.
Martin Halliwell, American Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021, £27.00). Pp. xiv + 424. isbn978 0 5203 7940 4.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2023
Extract
Since early 2020, pundits and commentators have scrutinized the history of past pandemics for answers to a series of questions shaped by COVID-19: what strategies have worked in the past to stem the spread of contagion? How long do epidemics typically last? Are vaccines an effective “magic bullet” against infectious diseases? The coronavirus crisis spawned comparisons to diseases as epidemiologically diverse as influenza, the Black Death, cholera, HIV/AIDS, and polio, as people excavated the records of past pandemics to try to make sense of the worst public-health disaster for over a century.1 Policy proscriptions emerged quickly from these historical analogies. Many public-health experts pointed to the trajectories of epidemics like the 1918–19 influenza outbreak and SARS to convey the gravity of what would happen if political leaders did not quickly and decisively issue stay-at-home-orders, close schools, and mandate social distancing.2
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies
References
1 Chris Wilson, “The Eerily Similar Pandemic We Could Have Learned From But Didn't,” The Conversation, 19 May 2020, at https://theconversation.com/the-eerily-similar-pandemic-we-could-have-learned-from-but-didnt-138072 (accessed 19 Sept. 2021); Jeffrey Kluger, “What the History of Polio Can Teach Us about COVID-19,” Time, 5 May 2020, at https://time.com/5831740/polio-coronavirus-parallels, (accessed 21 Sept. 2021); Edoardo Campanella, “The Bubonic Plague Killed Feudalism. COVID-19 Will Entrench It,” Foreign Policy, 20 Aug. 2020, at https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/20/bubonic-plague-pandemic-covid-19-inequality-feudalism (accessed 21 Sep. 2021); Alex Knapp, “The Dr. Fauci of the 1918 Spanish Flu,” Forbes, 28 April 2020, at www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2020/04/28/the-dr-fauci-of-the-1918-spanish-flu/?sh=7f7689683547 (accessed 23 Sept. 2021); and Olivia B. Waxman, “On World AIDS Day, Those Who Fought the 1980s Epidemic Find Striking Differences and Tragic Parallels in COVID-19,” Time, 1 Dec. 2020, at https://time.com/5915401/world-aids-day-covid-coronavirus-pandemic (accessed 23 Sept. 2021).
2 Adolph, Christopher, Amano, Kenya, Bang-Jensen, Bree, Fullman, Nancy, and Wilkerson, John, “Pandemic Politics: Timing State-Level Social Distancing Responses to COVID-19,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, 46, 2 (April 2021), 212–13CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Public-health experts looked to the 1918 flu for historical comparisons to COVID-19 because both are high transmissible respiratory illnesses that share many basic epidemiological features. The 1918 pandemic also confirmed the effectiveness of mandatory social distancing, business closures, and other public-health interventions. Recent studies in the field of historical epidemiology have confirmed that states and cities that locked down early in 1918 experienced lower morbidity rates than those that kept their economies open for longer. See Bootsma, Martin C. J. and Ferguson, Neil M., “The Effect of Public Health Measures on the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in US Cities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 18 (2007), 7588–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Markel, Howard, Lipman, Harvey B., Navarro, J. Alexander, Sloan, Alexandra, Michalsen, Joseph R., Stern, Alexandra Minna, and Cetron, Martin S., “Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Implemented by US Cities during the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic,” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 298, 6 (8 Aug. 2007), 644–54CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
3 Kelsey Piper, “Here's How Covid-19 Ranks among the Worst Plagues in History,” Vox, at www.vox.com/future-perfect/21539483/covid-19-black-death-plagues-in-history (accessed 21 Sept. 2021); Niall Ferguson, “How a More Resilient America Beat a Midcentury Pandemic,” Wall Street Journal, 30 April 2021, at www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-more-resilient-america-beat-a-midcentury-pandemic-11619794711 (accessed 21 Sept. 2021).
4 For just one of the myriad examples of newspaper articles on the history of mask wearing see Christine Hauser, “The Mask Slackers of 1918,” New York Times, 3 Aug. 2020, at www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/mask-protests-1918.html (accessed 23 Sept. 2021).
5 John Barry, “History Tells Us What a Virus Can Do to a President,” Washington Post, 4 Oct. 2020, at www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/04/history-tells-us-what-virus-can-do-president (accessed 30 Nov. 2021); Faith Karimi, “Before Trump, Another US President Downplayed a Pandemic and Was Infected,” CNN, 3 Oct. 2020, at https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/03/us/woodrow-wilson-coronavirus-trnd/index.html (accessed 30 Nov. 2021); Corky Siemaszko, “Trump Not the First President to Be Infected in a Pandemic, Woodrow Wilson Was in the Same Spot a Century Ago,” NBC News, 2 Oct. 2020, at www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-not-first-president-be-infected-pandemic-woodrow-wilson-was-n1241854 (accessed 30 Nov. 2021).
6 The 1918 influenza pandemic did not always serve as a useful template for the coronavirus crisis, primarily because of fundamental virological differences between the two diseases. On the dangers of historical comparisons between influenza and COVID-19 see Mari Webel and Megan Culler Freeman, “Compare the Flu Pandemic of 1918 and COVID-19 with Caution – The Past Is Not a Prediction,” The Conversation, 4 June 2020, at https://theconversation.com/compare-the-flu-pandemic-of-1918-and-covid-19-with-caution-the-past-is-not-a-prediction-138895 (accessed 30 Nov. 2021).
7 Nina Strochlic and Riley D. Champine, “How They Flattened the Curve during the 1918 Spanish Flu,” National Geographic, 27 Mar. 2020, at www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-cities-flattened-curve-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus (accessed 23 Aug. 2021).
8 Alex De Waal, “New Pathogen, Old Politics,” Boston Review, 3 April 2020, at https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/alex-de-waal-new-pathogen-old-politics (accessed 21 Sept. 2021). Historians have taken contradictory stances on the usefulness of historical analogies to COVID-19. For a sample of the different perspectives see Guillaume Lachenal and Gaëtan Thomas, “COVID-19: When History Has No Lessons,” History Workshop Online, 30 March 2020, at www.historyworkshop.org.uk/covid-19-when-history-has-no-lessons (accessed 19 Sept. 2021); Jones, David S., “COVID-19, History, and Humility,” Centaurus, 62, 2 (2020), 370–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fissell, Mary E., Greene, Jeremy A., Packard, Randall M., and Schafer, James A. Jr., “Introduction: Reimagining Epidemics,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 94, 4 (2020), 543–56CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
9 Tooze, Adam, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (New York: Viking, 2021), 23Google Scholar.
10 On the convergence between COVID-19 and the mobilization around Black Lives Matter see Reza Nakhaie and F. S. Nakhaie, “Black Lives Matter Movement Finds New Urgency and Allies Because of COVID-19,” The Conversation, 5 July 2020, at https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-movement-finds-new-urgency-and-allies-because-of-covid-19-141500 (accessed 20 Sept. 2021).
11 Statistic taken from Sharon Dolovich, “Mass Incarceration, Meet COVID-19,” University of Chicago Law Review Online, 16 Nov. 2020, at https://lawreviewblog.uchicago.edu/2020/11/16/covid-dolovich (accessed 26 Nov. 2021).
12 David Frum, “This Is Trump's Plague Now,” The Atlantic, 29 June 2020, at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/this-is-trumps-plague-now/613633 (accessed 4 Nov. 2021); Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti, and Julian E. Barnes, “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump's Failure on the Virus,” New York Times, 11 April 2020, at www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html (accessed 4 Nov. 2021); and Yasmeen Abutaleb, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Philip Rucker, “The Inside Story of How Trump's Denial, Mismanagement and Magical Thinking Led to the Pandemic's Dark Winter,” Washington Post, 19 Dec. 2020, at www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/trump-covid-pandemic-dark-winter (accessed 4 Nov. 2021).
13 Chowkwanyun, Merlin, “The 60/40 Problem: Trump, Culpability, and COVID-19,” in Zelizer, Julian E., ed., The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 315–34Google Scholar; Davis, Mike, The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2022)Google Scholar; and Price, Polly J., Plagues in the Nation: How Epidemics Shaped America (New York: Beacon Press, 2022)Google Scholar. See also Colbrook, Stephen, “Why Pandemics Matter to the History of U.S. State Development,” Modern American History, 4, 3 (Nov. 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.