The American Red Cross had volunteer nurses in Oakland in 1918. The Library of Congress has an Associated Press account.
The story was about what happens after a pandemic ends.
In early May, I pitched my idea to my editor. Adults in America could get a vaccine. The numbers started to fall. If the Spanish flu came after the '20s, did that mean we were on the path to another '20s? Would "Hot Vax Summer" be replaced by Decadent gatsby party autumn?
I began to dig. America 100 years ago had a lot of income inequality. The stock market is booming. There are racial uprisings. There is anti- immigrant sentiment. He left office with a lot of scandals. There is a lot of material for a story.
The epidemic didn't end.
Vaccinations stopped. There were new waves of infections and deaths caused by the Delta variant. Some states had more hospitalized COVID patients than they did during the winter surge. The economic outlook for this decade has changed from "champagne-soaked" to "room temperature." Omicron, which is currently on the verge of hitting California, is a new "variant of concern" announced by the World Health Organization.
I called my editor. I didn't think it was a good time to write a story about the end of the Pandemic.
The epidemic was not ending. Would it ever happen?
This is not the first time that we have stared down a disease. Epidemics, Pandemics, and Outbreaks have plagued us throughout history, and have affected a large number of people. We've survived a few.
How did those end? How can we get out of this one?
The flu is Spanish.
The Library of Congress has a photo of a demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. The Library of Congress has an Associated Press account.
Unclear, but probably not in Spain. It was a particularly deadly strain of H1N1 flu that first appeared in the US.
John Barry, the author of "The Great Influenza," said that if you heard that the disease was ordinary, you knew it was a lie.
Barry said there was no partisanship over the virus.
If the flu hit your town, a young person could wake up in the morning and be dead within 24 hours. Half of the people who died of the flu in 1918 were in their 20s and 30s.
The executive director of the American Public Health Assn. said it was a spooky time.
How did we beat the Spanish flu? We did not. We survived. It ran out of people to spread it to. A third of the world's population was believed to have contracted the Spanish flu, and it had a case-fatality rate of as high as 20% globally and 2.5% in the United States. The COVID-19 case fatality rate in the US is 1.6% as of December 2021. The number of Americans who died out of a population of 103.2 million was recently surpassed by COVID-19 victims. Flu vaccines wouldn't be widely available until the 1930s.
The virus went through a process called attenuation. It got worse. There are still strains of the Spanish flu floating around. It's not a disease.
We accept a certain amount of death from diseases. The seasonal flu kills less than 1% of people. Between 12,000 and 52,000 people have died in the US in the past decade.
The regular seasonal flu is less deadly than COVID-19. It was a light flu season due to the fact that people were washing hands, working from home and socially isolating. Measures were enough to keep the flu at bay despite the fact that business and school closings weren't enough. One strain may have been eliminated.
The flu could make a comeback if places reopen and people feel more confident about traveling. Have you gotten your flu shot yet?
Endemic was how it ended.
It is a disease that is caused by the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease of the disease
The first and second graders are inoculated against the disease in Los Angeles in 1955. The Associated Press
The first documented outbreak of the disease in the United States was in 1894. The first half of the 20th century saw a lot of diseases, most of which killed children and left many more paralyzed.
By the 1940s, the disease reached epidemic levels. In the 20th century, there were more than 600,000 cases of the disease in the United States and nearly 60,000 deaths. There were over 57,000 reported cases of the disease in 1952.
Benjamin said that Polio was every mother's problem. People were afraid of the disease.
In a household with an infectious adult or child, most of the susceptible people would develop evidence in their blood of being exposed. Paula Cannon, a professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine, told me that there is no transmission of the disease through the air. People make you a sandwich when they get it on their hands.
Even if you survived the initial infections, there could be long-term effects. Thousands of people lived with permanent paralysis from the disease. Others spent weeks, years, or the rest of their lives in iron lungs.
There were precautions taken during the outbreak. Public pools and schools are closed. A vaccine was a miracle in 1955.
The effectiveness of the two-dose course of the vaccine was similar to the effectiveness of the current COVID vaccines. The vaccine was not without side effects. A small number of people got the vaccine. Guillain-Barre syndrome is a noncontagious autoimmune disorder that can cause paralysis or nerve damage. Some people who received it were killed.
There were no anti-vaxxers. Cannon said that it was a "whole sense of the greater good" that this was the only way out of the problem. You would have had to be a monster to not want to be part of the solution.
The vaccine campaign was a moment of national unity, according to Benjamin.
The United States was free of the disease by 1979.
Vaccination ended.
Smallpox is a disease.
The disease began in the Eastern Hemisphere as early as 1157 BCE, and European colonizers brought it to North America in the early 1500s. The study suggested that colonizers killed as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population in some areas. In the 20th century, an estimated 300 million people were killed by the disease. The fatality rate of variola major infections is 30%.
After it arrived in North America, there wereoldids that affected half the population of the city of Boston. We tried to get people to take a weakened version of it. Onesimus, an enslaved man, is believed to have introduced the idea of a vaccine for the disease to North America in 1721 when he told Cotton Mather that he had undergone it in West Africa. To limited success, Mather tried to convince Boston doctors to consider inoculating residents during that outbreak. A doctor who inoculated 287 patients reported that 2% of them died of the disease, compared to a 14.8% death rate among the general population.
In 1777, George Washington ordered troops who had not already been bitten by the disease to be given a vaccine in which a small amount of vaccine was injected into their skin. Natural immunity was developed by most people who were inoculated. Some died at a lower rate than other ways of contracting the disease. The practice of inoculation was controversial enough that some people thought it was a conspiracy from slaves to trick white slave owners into killing themselves, others thought it was doctors playing God, and still others thought it was a conspiracy from slaves to trick white slave owners into killing themselves.
In England in 1796, Edward Jenner demonstrated the effectiveness of his vaccine. In a century, the number of deaths caused by smallpox went from being 1 in 13 in London to 1 in 100.
In 1947, an outbreak of smallpox hit New York City. Eugene Le Bar, the first person to die from the vaccine, had a scar on his body. Israel Weinstein, the city's health commissioner, held a news conference to encourage all New Yorkers to get a booster shot against the disease.
President Truman and the mayor got vaccinations. In just one month, more than 6 million people in New York were vaccine free. The New York outbreak resulted in the deaths of 2 people.
The last outbreak in our country affected 8 people.
In 1959 the World Health Organization announced a plan to eradicate smallpox. The disease was declared eradicated in 1980.
Benjamin said that the only disease that has ever been completely eradicated is smallpox. There are only a few remaining pathogens in laboratories.
Vaccination ended.
HIV/AIDS.
The first cases of AIDS were announced in 1981 by the CDC.
Half of Americans who contracted HIV in the early 1980s died of the disease within two years. The number of deaths from HIV peaked in the 1990s at 50,000, but have decreased since then.
For a long time, the Reagan administration did not take HIV seriously. HIV spread for years before scientists knew how it was transmitted. Gay activists who encouraged their community to use condoms were criticized for being sex-negative.
We know how to prevent the spread of HIV, and the treatments we have now can make the virus completely invisible.
Cannon said that if you're HIV positive, the HIV epidemic never went away. She said that it was ironic that we identified the cause of COVID and developed a vaccine within a year, only to have people refuse it.
In the 40 years since the first case of HIV appeared in the US, over a half a million people have died of the disease. In less than two years, we've killed more than one million people.
Endemic was how it ended.
There is a disease called SARS.
The first appearance of the disease in China in 2002 led to its appearance in the United States and 28 other countries.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome is caused by a coronaviruses named SARS-coV. COVID-19 is caused by a virus that is very similar to the one that killed people in Asia.
More than 800 people died from the outbreak, and more than 8,000 contracted it. By the end of February 2020, there were 10 times more cases of COVID-19 than there were at the beginning.
In the United States, there were only 8 laboratory-confirmed cases of the disease, and none of them died.
The fatality rate for young people was less than 1%, and for people over 65 it was more than 50%. The case fatality rate was 11%.
In areas unaffected by the disease, public anxiety was widespread.
There are a lot of similarities between COVID-19 and SARS. The way the government responded to the diseases wasn't the same as the way they were treated, according to Benjamin, who worked for the CDC during the outbreak.
There wasn't any spread of the disease. We had a functional test early on. The public health system was in better shape when we had it. He said that all those things went wrong. The public health system was not ready for prime time because it hadn't been invested in.
He said the response was immediate and robust. The WHO issued a global alert about a form of pneumonia in Asia. Travelers entering the US from Hong Kong and parts of China were warned by the CDC on March 14. By the end of the month, planning and guidance went into effect.
When public health organizations mapped out the genetic sequence, they quickly made a test for it, and began screening, and we communicated effectively to the public.
The disease stopped spreading before a vaccine or cure could be created. Scientists were aware that another coronaviruses could emerge and spread. The groundwork was laid for the development of the COVID-19 vaccines.
It died out after being controlled by public health measures.
There is a swine flu.
The subway station in Mexico City was shut down after the swine flu outbreak. Brennan Linsley is an Associated Press reporter.
The Spanish flu and swine flu were caused by the same type of virus.
There were about 60.8 million cases of swine flu in the US from April 2009 to April 2010 and there were over 200,000 hospitalizations and over 12,000 deaths. There were more swine flu cases than there were deaths in the same time period. The majority of swine flu deaths were younger than 65.
The CDC and the Obama administration declared public health emergencies after it was first detected in California. Hospital visits went up as well. Hundreds of schools were closed. Hospitals in Texas and North Carolina banned children from visiting because of overflow in the emergency room. Hospitals near Colorado Springs reported a 30% increase in flu visits. There were three-hundred-thousand doses of liquid Tamiflu for children released from the national Pandemic stockpile.
The CDC began to identify the strain of the virus for a potential vaccine in the same month that the first cases were detected. In October 2009, the first flu shots with H1N1 protections went into effect. The swine flu epidemic was declared over by the WHO. swine flu was not completely gone like Spanish flu.
Endemic was how it ended.
There is an outbreak of the disease, the Ebola.
The number of people who died from the disease in West Africa increased from 28,616 to 11,310. The man who would be president when the COVID-19 epidemic began, and the only two people who contracted the disease in the US, both died.
How did we escape? Unlike COVID, there is no spread of the disease in the air. It spreads through the bodily fluids of people who are experiencing symptoms, either directly or through bedding and other objects they've touched. If you haven't been close to a person with the disease, you have almost no chance of getting it.
Benjamin said that part of the problem in Africa was that families washed the bodies of the dead. The healthcare workers who treated patients without proper protective equipment or awareness of heightened safety procedures were at risk. The disease could be controlled once adequate equipment was delivered to affected areas and precautions were taken by healthcare workers and families of the victims. The public health crisis required people to temporarily change their behavior.
It's possible that we will see another outbreak of the disease in the future. The FDA approved a vaccine in 2019.
It ended after being controlled by public health measures.
How will COVID end?
In Los Angeles County, more than 27,000 people had died of COVID-19 by the end of December. There are flags at the observatory that honor L.A.'s dead. Luis Sinco is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
"Diseases end because they can't be transmitted through people or other sources that allow the transmission of the disease," Benjamin said.
He said that the most likely outcome is that COVID-19 is here to stay. His colleagues in epidemiology and public health seem to agree.
COVID has a lot going for it, as far as viruses go, and it can be spread by people who don't realize they have it. It can jump species, infecting animals and then potentially reinfecting us. One person can inadvertently spread it to a room full of people, and not enough people are willing to get vaccine at the same time to stop it. It's not as deadly as swine flu, but it's still in a sweet spot where it doesn't kill enough people to run out of victims. It's mild enough that people don't have to take precautions against it. No one thought about the diseases.
Cannon told me in May 2020 that if someone were designing a virus with the maximum capacity to succeed, it would look a lot like this coronaviruses.
She told me that one of the great things about the virus is its stealthiness. You can go hang out with friends and not obey the six-foot rule, but the next day you feel like death. She compared it to the way we shut down the disease, because everyone who had it was infectious. You woke up one day and felt like you were dead. People with infectious diseases couldn't walk with us. They walk amongst us with the coronaviruses.
What happens next? herd immunity can be achieved if enough people get vaccinations. In others, it will burn through the population until everyone has it, or it will die if you don't get immunity naturally. The United States has a high mortality rate from HIV and flu.
Benjamin said that they tolerate the tragedy a lot better when it's a disease that has been seen before. It is not as frightening to us.
Cannon said that he doesn't think COVID-19 will ever go away.
The Omicron variant is still being learned about. It's too early to say for sure, but early reports out of South Africa suggest it may be a milder version of the disease. COVID would go away completely if there was a strain that replaced the Delta variant and turned it into an illness that rarely requires hospitalization.
The combination of vaccine and naturally-gained immunity could turn it into a bad cold or flu.
The story was originally published in Los Angeles Times.
