“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.”
Conversation
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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Color blindness was a symptom, so many accounts are shaped by the bleak colors. The book takes its title inspiration from one such, a Katherine Anne Porter story. Pale refers to the literal paleness. This pandemic was witnessed in black and white by many
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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.
Replying to
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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Now back to the medical story and a confused early understanding due to a misattribution of influenza to a bacterium by germ theory pioneer Richard Pfeiffer en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_F
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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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Gotta admire the Christian missionaries who spread western medicine through the test of the world, as well as their politically courageous local sponsors, in the early 20th century. Double jeopardy: religious and lifestyle hostility.
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This book is giving me a sense of civilizational memento mori. Modernity is so young and fragile. Just a hundred years ago the world was vastly shittier than it is today, yet we’re callously risking hard-won things for shallow vanities. Kudos to GWB for learning this history.
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“Watson [one of the missionaries in Shanxi] measured the impact of the governor’s [Yen] modernization efforts by his own practical yardstick: how many villages spontaneously organized their own quarantine at the first indication of an outbreak.”
Worked well apparently.
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Possibly, it’s not current state of knowledge but openness to new states that determines success in adaptation. These superstitious Chinese villages 100 years ago in Shanxi were more open to learning and change than many ostensibly modern parts of the US today.
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People in Allied countries suspected biowarfare and wondered if Aspirin made by German company Bayer secretly contained more and whether German U-boats were spreading the flu. Today that would be suspicion of Russian or Chinese vaccines.
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This chapter has a vignette about a devout but backward part of Spain, Zamora, that avoided mass gatherings but excepted church gatherings. Had a devout and anti-science bishop who catalyzed lots of masses and funeral parades. Ended up with the worst record in Spain.
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Sad that religious congregations have been superspreading vectors from Black Death to Covid. It’s almost as though religion is a behavior like sneezing and coughing. Wear an atheism mask during pandemics people.
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Alright back to this thing. I feel like this is my capstone read in a Covid-adaptation course.
Where were we? Ah yes. Religious people spreading death with their beliefs in Spain.
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A chapter on how disgust-based distancing and burial practices are hygiene measures found beyond humans in nature and how these behaviors gave rise to distancing practices. Three big ones: cordon sanitaire, isolation, and quarantines. All 3 from times of ships and small towns.
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With the rise of big cities and other forms of travel besides sea, these measures became less popular. Takes a small town where everybody knows each other for this stuff to work without external top-down authoritah.
Large cities = impersonal = defection behaviors.
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Huh interesting, disease surveillance became a governance thing after the Middle Ages and by 20th century most western countries had systems for tracking spread of key diseases. The problem is, in 1918, influenza was not on the list. Slipped under the surveillance radar.
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For modern disease control you need 3 top down things to work: detection, tracking of spread, and compliance with measures. In our case, testing, research on spread (droplets etc), and masking. Older control measures don’t scale to modern cities.
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This point about historically cities and villages administering their own measures, often really harsh, is surprising. Town in England cordoned itself off and half the people died before it was lifted.
Makes sense. They had no good medicines. Containment had to do all the work.
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Flu snuck under radar everywhere except a few islands, Australia being the major one. They had enough warning and got quarantine right to skip first 2 waves. New Zealand didn’t.
American Samoa escaped because they figured out spread. Western Samoa, under New Zealand, didn’t.
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Long discussion of epidemiology 101, social distancing, masks, vaccine controversies etc. All familiar now but would have read like science fiction when this book came out. It’s weird to read about this stuff covered with reference to 1918 with academic distance.
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Feeling of not deja vu exactly but something like it. As in “omg they already knew all this stuff 100y before Covid and we’re just learning it under live fire and relitigating 1918 arguments like they’re new?”
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Must be weird for authors like Spinney to suddenly see their obscure interests take over headlines.
It’s like if 2x2s suddenly took over headlines and everybody started citing my 2x2 stuff.
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This part is a bit boring but would have been interesting in 2019. Authoritarianism vs democracy, role of newspapers, minorities and marginalized populations suspicious of health measures. All stuff we’ve been through live.
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One difference is that keeping schools open was a better bet then since kids otherwise lived in crowded tenements or ran around unsupervised.
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Extended description of New York’s relatively good performance despite early fumbles. It was full of particularly vulnerable Italian peasants at the time, living in slums and already disproportionately suffering from respiratory diseases like TB. Pandemic led to improvements.
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...Paired with similar extended description of events in Mashed, Persia, where things went much worse. At the time it was a medieval pilgrimage center and Persia was in a partial vacuum due to the collapse of Tsarist Russia and the Great Game.
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The British were filling the vacuum and doing their usual thing of simultaneously raiding the country (for troops) and trying to govern it. Two bad harvests and the people were already starving. It was set up to be a shitshow and it was.
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