copperbadge: copperbadge:copperbadge:Image text: November 21, 1918: Sirens sound in San Francisco an
copperbadge: copperbadge:copperbadge:Image text: November 21, 1918: Sirens sound in San Francisco announcing that it is safe for everyone to remove their face masks.December, 1918: 5,000 new cases of influenza are reported in San Francisco.I got bored waiting for work to show up in my inbox (everyone has Thanksgiving Hangover) so I decided to write a history paper on the end of the flu pandemic. The above is my favorite (”favorite”) piece of flu trivia to date. (For context, relative to the national population, 5,000 cases then is in the neighborhood of 15,000 cases now; considering the relative population density of the Bay Area then and now, almost certainly closer to 20,000.)(Source) Because I had one or two comments and several asks, a bullet-point summary of my paper because the paper itself is A Lot: There are two ends to pandemic: Medical (when community tranmission is low to nonexistent) and Social (when we “return to normal”).We will eventually return to a “surface” normal – no masks, no distancing – but ultimately our society will have changed a lot, not like this is news. (Insert here: women disproportionately leaving the workforce, emotional recovery from a year of quarantine, shifts in supply chain structure, drastic shifts in fashion, things I’m not writing about but might someday.)(Wait I just have to say every article I’ve read about post-COVID fashion features women talking about how great Birkies are and never wearing anything above a 3″ heel ever again and I hope that holds true.)There is a third ending to every pandemic: when the effects realistically fade. This will probably not be for a generation, because:The pandemic is not only creating a massive population of people with new and not-well-understood disabilities, but also:Past studies have indicated that children born during and just after pandemics have higher rates of health issues, including mental health (specifically schizophrenia).The 1918 pandemic was FUCKING BRUTAL. Want to see their “second wave” in action? In September 1918, twelve thousand people died from the flu. In October 1918, one hundred and ninety five thousand people died from it. We are not handling this well but relatively speaking, we could be doing worse!In the US, the “social” end of the 1918 pandemic came in 1919 when the disease petered out because it had killed or infected everyone it could. There was no single moment, no day or week or month, when it definitively “ended”, especially since there were fourth and fifth “regional” waves (which we will probably also see and which might fuck us up because long-distance travel is so much easier now). Guess what, this probably means that even with a vaccine the end of our pandemic will end with a whimper, not a bang, as well. This is depressing conclusion #1. The end of the pandemic, in combination with the end of WWI, led to a short economic depression followed by the Roaring 20s, the flourishing of speculative fiction, and a massive increase in nationalism and totalitarianism in America, including a spike in racial tensions and a huge jump in KKK membership. And then the Depression. While I’m not trying to claim America isn’t super nationalistic and more than a little totalitarian (and racist) now, we basically escaped becoming Much Bigger Nazi Germany at the time by electing Franklin Roosevelt.In 1932.During a massive Depression. Which is realistically when we began true “recovery” from the pandemic. (Depressing conclusion #2.)I’m still working on hard evidence of the social impact of the 1918 epidemic on the 1920s and early 1930s, especially since it’s so tied up with the end of WWI. Our emergence from the pandemic will probably not be as difficult and long-term, socially, as in 1919-1921. And I mean, they may not have bounced fully back until the mid-30s, but the 20s were economically and socially not the worst time we’ve ever had. Ultimately what this all led to was my greater understanding that we cannot look back to look forward. The future is not only uncharted, we can’t trace it from the past. There are too many differing factors, and most of what we could learn from the 1918 pandemic we already knew. We are going to have to write our own rules. All that said, this coming decade should be….interesting. Update: I decided to really nosedive on this thing and once I had summarized the history of the 1918-1919 pandemic, complete with a two-year-long recession at the end of it, I decided to study how recessions happen and how we think we can stop them. The bad news is that nobody truly understands how or why recessions happen, and most economists believe they’re simply part of the lifecycle of capitalism.The good news is that most economists, liberal and conservative, now believe that the best way to beat a recession is:Reduce interest rates(Which we can’t do ‘cause we already did)Increase government spending and/or tax cuts to put wealth into the economyHelicopter money drops, which is literally “give everyone cash money dollars” ala the $1.2K checkProtect our most vulnerable populations, because when they fail everyone else gets real fucked up about it and nobody spends any moneyIt seems fairly fortuitous that three of the four options before us can all be combined into one large program where the government spends a bunch of money to alleviate poverty and support our failing social safety nets. Almost like some kind of….some kind of program, a new kind of program, like a new….a new deal….. -- source link