Lessons From the 1918 Influenza Pandemic on How to Celebrate the Holidays Amid COVID-19
Time
12/21/2020
Sentinel.
On Dec. 14, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 reached a grim, new milestone: 300,000 Americans killed. That’s nearly half of the 675,000 Americans killed a century ago during the 1918 flu, the deadliest pandemic in the 20th century, as historian Christopher Nichols pointed out on Twitter. The current wave of COVID-19 infections is the worst it’s been nationwide and, as TIME reported, cases are expected to continue to rise after Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
The rapid spread today is in stark contrast to this time more than a century ago in 1918. After a first wave in the spring, a deadlier and more contagious second wave hit in early fall. Cities that quickly implemented control measures (mask mandates, closures of schools and public places, etc.) and kept them in place longer, saw lower death rates compared to cities that took fewer of these steps and for a shorter amount of time, a 2007