CitizenNathan puts his big boy pants on and finally reads about the Spanish Flu #1
What a day in February has to do with today
I write some shorter things, some longer thoughts, and some blurbs. If you want just the blurbs, skip to the bottom.
If you're going to skip the longer parts, just know that February 27th, 2020, was an important day and that Dr. John Shaw Billings made the first great contribution to scientific medicine: a library. Yet, as John Barry writes, "knowledge is useless unless accessible. To disseminate knowledge, Billings developed a superior cataloging system. No comparable bibliography existed anywhere else in the world."
The key to understanding our times is curation, especially in the time of coronavirus. There is so much information circulating, it is overwhelming. Who do we trust for news? What article do we base our risk-analysis for Covid-19 on? Where do we find a book that we will enjoy? What history helps us understand today better?
This is a chance for me to think and analyze more what I am reading, and hopefully help make information and knowledge more accessible for you.
We are living through a war against a novel coronavirus. Our world is upside down, we are shut down, and as they want us to say, alone together. But in reality, we are each alone to come up with our own plan to stay safe. There is no unified plan. The cavalry is not coming to save us. Our President says there is no more national funding for states. We know the virus spreads via asymptomatic carriers, but we are only testing people with symptoms or those in close contact with a positive. How do we know where the virus is? We do not. We are all just guessing and creating our own risk profile tables. Our lives have changed so quickly. Nobody could have predicted this… Well, except for the epidemiologists advising Lawrence Wright or Steven Soderbergh in their works of "fiction" about the spread of deadly infectious diseases. They knew all along.
February 27th, 2020.
This day seems important. Where were you on 2/27/20?
I was sitting in my car after daycare drop off and had time to listen to The Daily. Covid-19 was already circulating in different places around the US, enough so that a task force was created, but it was not changing people's behavior. Conferences, travel, sports, it was all still happening.
Michael Barbaro, the host of one of the most popular podcasts in America, asks Don McNeil a Times Reporter on The Daily episode that day;
"…how do you rank this epidemic in terms of previous epidemics, in terms of — let me use some unscientific words here — bigness, scariness, awfulness?"
Mcneil answers;
I spend a lot of time thinking about whether I'm being too alarmist or whether I'm being not alarmist enough. And this is alarmist, but I think right now, it's justified. This one reminds me of what I have read about the 1918 Spanish influenza. And the reason I say that is because, right now, the only measure we have for the death rate from this Flu is a study that the Chinese did of the first 45,000 cases. And of those, 80 percent were mild. 20 percent were various degrees of seriousness, up to critical and on a respirator and in organ failure. And 2.3 percent died. Now, 2.5 percent mortality is about the mortality rate of the 1918 flu.
Ok, this seemed like a pretty big deal. Why was the whole country not freaking out? Why were people still traveling? On twitter some mornings, I could see images of the China lockdown. They were spraying vents. People were wearing Hazmat suits. But this was China…it was so far away.
Ok, you know the rest. It is not going well. The WHO should have listened to Dr. Camilla Rothe . Asymptomatic carriers are spreading the disease. How do you contain a virus if people do not have any symptoms? Well, easy, you wear a mask and you test frequently. But now masks are part of the cultural war, and we do not have federal funding for a national testing program. You can not re-open without accessible testing for surveillance purposes..and on, we are not doing much right.
For the first month, I did not want to listen or read about the breaking news. The virus was spreading, and it was hitting close to home, very close. I needed a break. I listened to a great book on the Sixers' tanking history. I listened to John Feinstein's most recent book about mid-major programs, The Back Roads to March, during the 2018-2019 college basketball season. It was a useful distraction. It kept my heart rate down, I was able to sleep.
Then I dove in.
I read John Barry's book, The Great Influenza.
I quickly realized that infectious diseases are an integral part of our history and often overlooked. Why? Probably because we do not want to come to terms with the idea that we are as vulnerable to an invisible enemy. We like to believe we can stop a war if only men stop doing stupid things and start wars for bs reasons, i.e see most wars- fewer people will die. But what about a virus that we can not contain? It seems like the first thing we should learn about military history is that more soldiers die from the disease than the actual war itself. Barry writes, "Whatever the origin, a virus has only one function: to replicate itself." Every history book on conflict should start with this quote.
Barry devotes a considerable amount of his book's early parts to the history of early 20th Century medical eduction. Why was I reading about Harvard Medical School just being a finishing school for rich kids with not much scientific medical research education? At first, I did not make the connection. But Barry masterfully weaves together the public health officials who act like detectives asking the right questions, or entrepreneurs doing quick marketing experiments to isolate the virus. Johns Hopkins led the way in transforming medical education. It became rooted in science, not theory. There are no shortcuts in fighting infectious diseases. It takes training and critical thinking, and the tenacity to test, test, and test some more. You also have to live with the uncertainty, to understand what you do not know, the French physiologist, Claude Bernard, said, "Science teaches us to doubt."
During the Spanish Flu —
( Barry writes that it was probably called the Spanish Flu because the media did not have censors in Spain about the influenza virus so they reported on it, while in other places, like the United States where the virus originated, there were wartime censors. As California Senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, "The first casualty when war comes is truth.")
-- leaders ignored it, the media lied to people about how devastating a disease it was, nurses and doctors died, and people got the sickness in the morning, and then died at night. When the virus arrived at military bases or a shipyard (Chelsea, MA) , political leaders told the public it was limited to the military base, but of course, it was not. It spread like wildfire. When Wilson was negotiating the first World War peace treaty, he most likely had influenza. It affected his brain. If he was influenza-free, would there have been a more sensible peace plan for Germany's economic recovery? Influenza altered the course of history, and we barely speak about it.
In his afterword, Barry writes about his original inspiration for diving into this subject, "I wanted to see how American society reacted to an immense challenge, a war nature had launched against humanity imposed on a war humans had launched against one another. And I wanted to see what lessons we might take from such an investigation….If there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it's that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis. Risk communication implies managing the truth. You don't manage the truth. You tell the truth."
Sorry, John, we missed that lesson. Public health officials warned us, and we mucked it all up. Now they are being harassed for trying to help us (and resigning).
Reading the book, especially the afterword, is like reading a preview of what would happen in 2020. Our hospitals would be inundated, we would not have enough respirators, and our entire healthcare system would be overwhelmed.
"Disease impact would also ripple through the economy to disastrous effect. With everyone from air traffic controllers to truck drivers out sick, just-in-time inventory systems would crash, supply chains would collapse, for lack of some part of production lines would shut down, while schools and daycare facilities might close for weeks, and an overburdened "last mile" would limit the ability of people to work from home."
He wrote all of this in 2005. Here is an interview he did a few months ago with Chris Hayes, do not listen before bedtime, and do not worry, Barry does not narrate his book's Audible version. He has the voice of a writer, not for radio.
Round-Up of the Internet
Jack McCallum one of the best NBA writers …ever… takes his Dream Team book and turns it into a podcast. Also, there were problems with the Last Dance.
Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote the 2010 masterpiece The Warmth Of Other Suns has a recent NYT Mag cover story that is an excerpt from her new book! about the caste system in the United States. The artwork to go along with the piece is excellent as well.
"Caste" is not a word often applied to the United States. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists and scholars of race in America have made use of the word for decades. Before the modern era, one of the earliest Americans to take up the idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and U.S. Senator Charles Sumner as he fought against segregation in the North. "The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race," he wrote, "is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality." He quoted a native of India: "Caste makes distinctions among creatures where God has made none."
Why did the Trump rally in Tulsa have so many empty seats? It might not be the obvious answer, to lower contagion, but it is still fascinating. A new kind of online political activism.
Ramy was renewed for a third season on Hulu. There is not another show like it. Sometimes it is unbearable to watch, and but most of the time, I watch while thinking, this is some of the most unique television I have ever seen.
Alec MacGillis writes for Pro Publica and the New Yorker about the violence at Dollar General Stores. There have been 200 hundred violent incidents involving guns since 2017 via the Gun Violence Archive. A few years ago, I read a story about how Dollar General Store was moving into places that were too poor for even Wal-Mart. Dollar General has grown exponentially in the last few years, and so has the stock price. Investing in DG is a bet on income inequality in the US. That is a good bet.
Michael Osterholm on Fresh Air. Listen to everything he says about Covid-19. I also heard him speak on a private Zoom call that he sees 34% fewer Measles immunizations in his area from 2019. If things are not bad enough, he predicts a Measles outbreak at some point next year.
Not Boring Newsletter . There is a lot of value packed in a newsletter here. This particular issue is about the problems with Twitter. Like the author, Packy McCormick, I find twitter to be the most exciting platform, but the business model stinks. He writes, "Twitter thinks it is Facebook, but it is LinkedIn. It is a subscription business." They have not figured out the small business advertising component. I have tried to use their ad network platform many times, and it does not drive website visits. The assets of the business are being underutilized, and Packy lays it all out. I also love the branding. When a new newsletter hits your inbox, it looks like "Not Boring" is sending it. It makes you have to open it! Also, how would the New York Times make a cartoon from my twitter -to-editor post without the platform?
Books
Commencement. J. Courtney Sullivan has a new book out, but her first book is like taking a Watchmen-like nostalgia pill for anybody who went to one of the Five Colleges in western MA during the aughts. I also took a few classes at Smith College, so I pretty much went there, the 5 college system is excellent! There is a deep longing for the before times, books about college, and the early twenties. Everything seems so important, but it is all so trivial. Take me back.
Taffy Brodessner-Akner, author of the award-winning Fleishman is in Trouble just finished her 2nd book*! It looks good! I also got to hear her talk about it from a virtual book talk. It turns out virtual book talks are the best kind of book talks. No crazies are asking long-winded never-ending statements during Q&A!
*I promise not to source my tweets again, or at least for a while.
Speaking of Taffy... on the topic of how do you choose what to read. Taffy tweeted about Barcelona Days, and I purchased it, and listened to it, and loved it. I will finish this letter on the power of discovery that happens at the bookstore. Read this thread by the bookseller, Josh Cook.