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We’re gonna get a African-women-narrative/Talmudic style story. Circling the subject with widening circles of context, weaving it into space and time. Sounds like fanfic. I’m down. Let’s go.
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So apparently global perspective is recent scholarship. In Europe death rate from Spanish Flu was the lowest. WW1 took 2-6x as many lives. But elsewhere SF was much bigger. So opposite pattern of Black Death.
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Book has 8 parts with 2-5 chapters each. Part 1 is a history of flu viruses. They date to agriculture since they need higher population densities. More co-adapted to humans than malaria or leprosy, not as exclusively parasitic on us as mumps, measles, rubella.
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So birds are thought to be the natural reservoir of flu viruses, and pigs an intermediate host. Makes sense that we’ve had avian and swine flus.
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Discussion of how the flu was likely very deadly when it first appeared between 5-12k years ago and adapted to humans. Some discussion of native Americans getting wiped out by European diseases. Dry opening so far, but I appreciate the context setting. Will stop here tonight.
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1580 was the first properly documented flu pandemic. 10% of Rome died: 8000. Two in 18th century. 19th century was peak of crowd diseases generally.
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Industrial revolution cities “... were unable to sustain themselves— they needed a constant influx of healthy peasants from the countryside to make up for the lives lost to infection. Wars too brough epidemics in their wake.”
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1830 and 1889, two flu pandemics in 18th century. So these things are not common. Wonder if there’s been a coronavirus pandemic before SARS-COV-2 and -1.
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1889 “Russian” flu — 3 waves, mild-severe-mild. 1 million. First one to be statistically profiled. It also attacked adults, not just elderly and children. Apparently Edvard Munch Scream was fly inspired 😱
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By early 20th century cities were self-sustaining thanks to germ theory of disease, vaccines, and sanitation. Wars became deadlier than epidemics and military doctors learned to control disease in conflict. But viruses still a mystery.
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Even in the 19th century people thought of epidemics like earthquakes. Acts of god and beyond control. Hmm. Even with earthquakes today you can sort of manage risks by building on bedrock far from fault lines. I guess plate tectonics was like germ theory.
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“In England [the plague’s] last visitation coincided with the Spanish flu” Infectious disease was still the big killer. Antibiotics hadn’t yet been discovered. Modern germ theory was still pretty new.
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Pasteur and Koch did their work between 1850-80. As new in 1918 as genetics today (which was unknown then) Viruses were discovered in 1890. So as new then as the World Wide Web today. Modernity is young.
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March 4th 1918, guy named Albert Gitchell reported sick to the infirmary at Camp Funston in Kansas. Conventionally regarded as the start of the pandemic.
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By May, all over Europe and starting in Africa, by end of May in India. by June/July in China, Japan, Australia. Unclear where it started, but war helped spread it fast.
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Longish tour of the spread of the second wave. Rather dry account of the complex pattern of spread. Peppered with a few anecdotes featuring Jung, Yeats, Kafka, Leo Szilard, etc. The war wraps and celebrations immediately cause crowd superspread events.
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Second wave was deadliest and ended by December. Australia was the only major region that kept it out via quarantine. But third wave in summer 1919 got them too. So 3 waves of a few months each. Kinda different from the relatively continuous ooga-booga of Covid.
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Now that we’ve surveyed the station-temporal contours, on to Chapter 4, about the disease itself. Mostly mild in first wave but deadly in second. Mutation? Most deaths due to bacterial pneumonia, Faces and extremities turned dark and they came up with a color coded death watch.
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So far I’ll admit this book is very dry relative to others. This African-grandmother circling narrative model is a little almanac-like. I think we’re going to go over the 3 waves with a dozen different lenses.
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“The distress of the bereaved was compounded by the look of the cadaver: not just the blackened face and hands, but the horribly distended chest” That’s Spanish Flu. Do Covid victims look as distressing?
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Extended section on the symptoms. It’s interesting to compare this to the relatively limited descriptions of blac death in the Tuchman book. Distant mirror vs proximal mirror. That came alive better but this feels more grimly real and less like aestheticized fiction.
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“Delirium was common... [a doctor] described his patients’ anxiety-provoking sensation that the end of the world was nigh, and their episodes of violent weeping.”
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Vignette in Rio, anchored by the story of a young man, Nava, living with middle-class uncle’s family. He fell sick. Depressingly familiar tale of good shortages and closed schools. It was initially dismissed as an old-people-killer and elites didn’t want over-reaction.
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Vaccines had only just been socialized. Ten years earlier smallpox vaccinations had led to vaccine riots in Brazil. By 1918 most were vaccinated but state public health was still unpopular.
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Bodies piling up in street. A famous carnival reseller, Jamanta, Jose Luis Cordeiro, drove a tram up and down the streets collecting bodies and dumping them at the graveyard. The church bells rang continuously driving people living nearby nuts. Shades of NYC under Covid.
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“Terror transformed the city, which took on a post-apocalyptic aspect. Footballers played to empty stadia” Err why? They didn’t have TV...
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Chapter ends with the death of Nava’s pretty second cousin who he appears to have had a crush on. This thing was very quick compared to Covid. In and out in 2 months but huge toll very quickly. Must have been like a horror movie.
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Chapter 5. Extended riff on dangers of naming diseases poorly (eg swine flu is not spread by pigs but pork exportsxweee banned by several countries anyway). Discussion of CDC naming guidelines which looks grim in light of Trump drumming on China/Wuhan virus.
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Spanish Flu was of course not Spanish. It had been in US, UK, France for months before it arrived in Spain. Wartime censorship plus neutrality of Spain plus encouragement from the nations at war led to the name sticking.
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This book is making me relive March/April in a deja vu way, and also re-frightening me, which is good. I might have been getting sloppy. Earlier this week, someone in my close circle died of Covid, much too young, and it was a sudden sharp reality check. This is still very real.
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“In Senegal, it was the Brazilian flu, and in Brazil, it was the German flu...” Some progress. In 2020 we have more certainty around origins but at least largely call it coronavirus except for troglodytes like trump. Some evolution of a shared sense of humanity.
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That was a short chapter on names that ended on a note of “sorry Spain, sucks to be you” Took a while for it to be recognized that there was one global pandemic in, not many local ones. Again, progress. We knew pretty quickly. It was named, tagged, and tracked fairly early.
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People confused it with cholera, dengue, plague, typhus... most doctors would only have looked at surface symptoms like black spots on cheekbones. The most advanced practitioners would have made sputum bacterial cultures mistakenly following Pfeiffer’s theory.
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This was just 102 years ago. All four of my grandparents were living through this 😓 Today we’re lucky enough to have political controversies about proper testing of the correct thing. The FUD in 1918 must have been mind-boggling. They were MINOs: Moderns in Name Only.
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In Chile, elitist doctors thought it was typhus (spread by lice and apparently considered a disease of social decline), blamed the poor, and launched a misguided typhus campaign but didn’t ban gatherings. The 2 look alike except typhus spreads slower and ends in a rash.
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The sanitary brigades invaded poor homes and ordered the poor to strip, wash, and shave hair. In some places they burned down poor tenements and the homelessness probably caused flu to spread faster. All societal ignorance reliably hurts the poor first. 😶 Still true with Covid
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Now a vignette from Shanxi in China where a reformist warlord battles traditional Chinese medicine with the aid of American missionaries who were the only source of western medicine. The locals mightily resisted modern medicine and sought refuge in appeasing dragon gods.
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Sadly I think this stuff is still potent. Indian WhatsApp is full of bullshit traditional medicine ideas and religious crap. Though to their credit, people seem to be treating them as a second line of defense rather than first.
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