ANSWER:
Lessons from history for the Current Covid-19 Pandemic:
Third year history student Tomás Pizarro-Escuti explores the lessons of The Spanish Flu through the lenses of applied history.
History, in its purest form, can be defined as the knowledge of humanity’s past based upon reliable sources. Nevertheless, the historian’s role in its reconstruction of the past should not only be inspired by knowledge for its own sake but rather to collect the lessons of the past, to understand the present and project us into the future. This, in my view, is history’s ultimate purpose and the guiding value that should be shared by those devoted to this discipline.
The pandemic that spread across the world in the first half of the twentieth century, known as the “Spanish flu” (1918-1920) left humanity with lessons that can be applied today to better confront the latest coronavirus epidemic which continues to expand throughout the planet. These lessons are as relevant to the social, political, and economic fields as they are to the medical sciences.
According to the limited statistics of the period, the Spanish flu infected approximately half a billion people and caused between 50 and 100 million deaths. This is almost six times more people than the 17 million soldiers and civilians who died in the First World War and equivalent to around three per cent of the world population at the time. The large number of victims was undoubtedly due to the fact that most countries lacked the necessary hospital infrastructure, enough medical professionals and the medicines needed to cope with the virus, whose contagiousness and deadly effects were higher than COVID-19. The sources of the period (mainly newspapers and journals that were consulted) show that in the face of the devastating effects of this pandemic, the different health services across the world used all the means at their disposal to mitigate it; from the old procedure of bleeding patients, to supplying oxygen to those in the most critical state, and the most common method of providing enormous quantities of aspirin to those infected.
