Looking back and looking ahead: COVID-19 still going strong
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It’s hard for me to imagine that a book written in 2006 about events from almost 100 years prior could be so prescient. The Great Influenza, by John Barry, is just that and I urge you all to read it. It’s a cautionary tale, a prophecy if you will, of what can happen in the world where leadership fails, science is ignored and the public is panicked — sound familiar?
About 4 or 5 months ago, Christopher Ritchlin — a dear friend with whom I have many shared interests, especially reading — recommended this book to me. I made a mental note of it but was off put that it was 14 years old and I did not know of it. Last month, my daughter Cassie, another great reader, told me she inhaled it over a long weekend, so I downloaded it to my Kindle and read it in 4 days. Yes, it was long but it was great and I was moved to say the least.
Source: Penguin Publishing Group.
The story is obviously about the 1918 influenza pandemic — also known as the Spanish flu — which killed more people on our little planet than any other known event/disease in the history of civilization. Yes, the great plague of the Middle Ages wiped out a larger percentage of the populace, but, numerically, the 50 million to possibly as high as 100 million who lost their lives to the wave after wave of an infection that could not be dispatched has thankfully never been equaled. As we sit here, on the eve of the U.S. presidential election, reeling from only the second wave of COVID-19, I get chills down my spine.
The book has beauty and scope as well, as it recounts the evolution of the pandemic through the lens of the history of medicine, which reflected that it was a time of great transition. For the most part, the medical world was pre-Flexnerian with an abundance of poorly trained and quack physicians. It was also a time, however, when there was a rise of science with great institutions such as Johns Hopkins and the Rockefeller, as well as great scientists such as Oswald Avery and others. Barry describes the pandemic as the first clash between an infection and modern science. Add the backdrop of World War I and you have a compelling miniseries — only this story was real.
We as physicians implicitly recognize that many perished from secondary bacterial infections, as this took place in the pre-antimicrobial era, but this small comfort is not the part of the tale that struck me. It was more the tale of governmental ineptitude (officials were not listening to the public health officials — imagine that?), fake news (the lay press severely downplayed the epidemic) and the public was divided on how to act and in whom and what to believe. Furthermore, some locales, like St. Louis, did quite well because they behaved and followed public health measures while others did unbelievably poorly, like Philadelphia, which suffered from corruption, ineptitude and hubris of their leaders.
Rheumatology must stand tall in this pandemic and it is doing just that in my opinion. The fact that the American College of Rheumatology, again, has Anthony Fauci, MD, to keynote our national meeting speaks loudly as to where our values and beliefs and our commitment to science and the public’s health are centered. Bravo!
I think this book should be required reading by all politicians and community leaders and I have recommended it to many of my patients as well. If you take up my recommendation, please share your reflections with me through Twitter at @LCalabreseDO or email me at calabrl@ccf.org.
I will end with my favorite quote from the book, which requires no explanation. “Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.”
- For more information:
- Leonard H. Calabrese, DO, is the Chief Medical Editor, Healio Rheumatology, and Professor of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, and RJ Fasenmyer Chair of Clinical Immunology at the Cleveland Clinic.
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