#178 The 1918 Spanish Flu Aftermath

Siim Land (0:00)

You probably heard that history tends to repeat itself. And I do have to agree in a way that there are many past events that seemingly tend to reoccur, and they happen like every once in a while, almost like in a cyclical manner. And it applies especially to wars, different plagues, crises, economic collapses and revolutions, all those things, they tend to repeat themselves quite often.

And there are actually many like commonalities or like very similar patterns that you can see in history that bring those events about.

And it's quite, I think it's a quite important lesson to keep in mind, especially during these times that we go through nowadays. And yeah, like this year 2020 has been quite dramatic and quite eventful. So I've heard the saying that usually nothing happens within decades, but sometimes decades happen within weeks. And yeah, these months of 2020 have been very, very, very eventful. And it doesn't look like things are slowing down. So in a way, I wanted to dedicate this podcast to looking at history and looking at what has happened in the past in terms of these similar events. And in fact, there has been like a very similar event in the past exactly 100 years ago, which is another good sign in a way of how history tends to repeat itself. So 100 years ago, there was the Spanish flu, which is also considered one of the most widespread pandemics of history next to like the Black Death and others. So we're going to look into it, what has happened or what happened during the Spanish flu and what happened afterwards and what kind of ramifications even led to like more drastic events and what kind of lessons can we learn from it? Because I think history is going to be a really important thing to look at, like in terms of preparing for future events as well as preventing more serious events from happening. So this episode is going to be talking about the Spanish flu of 1918

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In 1918, the world went through one of the deadliest pandemics in history. The Spanish Flu. It lasted for 36 months until the year 1920

It infected 500 million people, which was about one third of the world's population at that time. At least 50 million people died, possibly up to 100

This flu killed more people in 24 months than HIV in 24 years. So it was quite deadly. The Spanish Flu was an especially deadly influenza-type virus with a high mortality rate amongst young adults. Nearly half the deaths happened between the ages 20 and 40 So people in their prime years were most affected by it, which is quite the opposite to what we have nowadays.

And it was quite uncommon. It was thought that this was caused by an inflammatory cytokine storm created by the body in response to the infection that basically ravages the immune system and leaves the person more vulnerable to respiratory failure and pneumonia.

Younger children and the elderly, they saw fewer deaths because they actually have a slightly weaker immune system in response to the virus. And therefore they experience less damage from the cytokine storm as well. So their body doesn't overreact to it.

People who got infected, they started showing adverse symptoms within hours. They got extreme fatigue, high fever, loss of appetite, headaches, and they sometimes even started to turn blue.

The skin turned blue. Coughing would often cause foamy blood to be expelled from the mouth as well as noses. Many victims died within 24 hours of showing first symptoms. So there wasn't many asymptomatic carriers, so to say. People caught the virus and they died pretty quickly. The lethality was exacerbated by the poor living conditions of most people at that time. You see, most countries were also fighting in World War I, and therefore the population was more malnourished and medical facilities were already slightly overcrowded. Morgues were also forced to stack dead bodies like cordwood in corridors because there weren't enough coffins or people to bury them.

That's something that you might have seen in the news nowadays as well.