The "Let This Never Be Forgotten!" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Trying to picture what it must have been like back in 1918 into 1919 when the world's worst-ever influenza pandemic struct the Unites States.  The influenza first struck in Kansas in March of 1918, as the U.S. was stepping up its involvement in the First World War.  At the time American and European governments downplayed the epidemic, which in turn caused it to spread.  Sound familiar?  Estimates of from 17 million to close to 100 million people died with about 700,000 of those being residents of the United States.  But, when it had finally ended, it seemed to have been wiped from the minds of everyone who went through it.  The U.S. Congress didn't even allocate money for flu research afterward.  Even history books said nothing about the flu.  It wasn't until 1976 that the first history of the 1918 flu was a placed in a book.  The book was called America's Forgotten Pandemic and it was authored by Alfred W. Crosby.  I personally don't remember learning anything about the flu pandemic in high school or even college.  Eventually, some studies were done which told the results of the 1918 pandemic.  Women who had the flu and were in the first months of a pregnancy had babies that were likely to have diabetes.  Women who had the flu at the end of their pregnancy tended to bear children prone to kidney disease.  The middle months were associated with heart disease.  Another test showed that children born during the pandemic grew into shorter, poorer and less educated adults with higher rates of physical disability than one would expect.  It was proven that pandemics have long-term, powerful after effects.  Though we have had several wars since 1918, it seems that the 1918 pandemic has killed more that any war did.  And, it wasn't just to one or two individual countries.  It killed people all over the world.  Sound familiar?  And, what's hard to understand is that the influenza virus wasn't even identified until 1931. It inspired fear of immigrants and foreigners, and anger toward the politicians who played down the virus.  Sound familiar?  The 1918 flu killed more men than women.  Some say the war had something to do with that, but is that true?  So, now we have the coronavirus pandemic.  There is no one alive who can predict the consequences of this virus.  Will this pandemic make it into the history books?  We actually know more about the Black Death that swept through Europe from 1347 to 1350, killing about a third to half of all Europeans than we do about the 1918 influenza and the current coronavirus.  Now, I must admit, nobody thinks the coronavirus will kill anywhere near as many people as the Black Death did.  But, the new virus has been a shock to society and due to the lack of knowledge from the 1918 influenza pandemic, we just don't know what to expect.  In the 1970s pre-med students studied a textbook co-written by award winning writer and virologist Macfarlane Burnet who forecast that the future of infectious disease will be very dull.  So, the medical world wasn't prepared for this pandemic.  The lessons must be learned from past mistakes and the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic must never be forgotten.  It must me placed in history books and be part of medical studies from here on.  Many have placed blame for our predicament on just about everyone from China to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Donald Trump, but no matter whom you want to blame, it will only be us to blame if we don't document this tragedy and write about it beginning now.  Let it never be forgotten.  Let those who have died due to it not be forgotten.  They died for a reason.  Let's write about that reason so it will never be forgotten.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.