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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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