It's hard to think about these potential calamities. Any given pandemic is unlikely to be on the scale of 1918. But the next big one will come, eventually. Any given asteroid strike is unlikely to be on the scale of a Yucatan. But the next big one will come, eventually. And the fact that there were so many small pandemics, impacts and so on will be used as evidence by Naysayers that there's nothing to worry about. And Doomsayers will continue to classify each potential calamity as uniquely dangerous in order to gain leverage.
But the problem is that the Naysayers have been continuously right since 1918! So the problem given that we now cry wolf several times a month (a few weeks ago we were "on the verge of ww3"), is that how can you give any credibility to a real threat when it ultimately comes?
I was watching a Nova episode about Fukushima and it seems inexplicable that the plant was designed how it was. Humans just couldn’t fathom the sort of black swan tsunami event that happened, when in hindsight we can see it was inevitable that it would happen. I’m trying to apply this sort of thinking to my own problem solving.
Other reactors on the Japanese coast survived because they updated the breakwaters after the Indonesian tsunami. So it wasn't really a black swan event because another tsunami had happened a few years earlier.
There's a couple things to note about the Fukushima disaster. They planned for a tsunami, but at the time the plant was built IIRC the scientific consensus was that a tsunami was caused by a large landslide underwater. They surveyed the underwater topology around the site, they thought they were building a sea wall high enough that any tsunami in that area would be too small to overtop it.
The theory was improved in the years since the plant was constructed but no one ever went back and realized the implications for Fukushima Daiichi. It was not a new plant, they broke ground on it before they did on Chernobyl. They thought a tsunami was inevitable and planned for it, they just didn't realize that they were operating on a flawed theory of how tsunamis form.
Stephen King really tapped into one of our worst fears. I always thought it was brilliant that it was just a strong version of the flu, and not something exotic.
Above link is “Don’t Fear The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult opening to “The Stand” TV show, showing presumably dead people that contracted the super flu.
As others have said, the current understanding is that it was cytokine storms. Your immune system responds to an infection by creating white blood cells which in turn release cytokines to cause inflammation.
That's normally a helpful response and part of how your immune system fights infections. But it also involves raising your body temperature, breaking down cells, and changing blood pressure. When those processes go too far, they can end up hurting or killing the organism by taking out too many healthy cells or interfering with circulation.
The Spanish flu triggered a very strong immunological response. So you had a mortality spike around 20-40 years old because those were the people with such healthy immune systems that their inflammation over-reacted and killed them.
By analogy, it's sort of like your house catching on fire. Hundreds and hundreds of fire fighters pile in, so many that they building actually collapses from their weight.
According to "The Great Influenza" by John Barry young people died due to cytokine storms. Essentially young people have a vigorous immune system that gave an aggressive attack. 1918 flu was unique in that the deaths was not just the very young and the very old (a U shaped distribution) but rather a W shaped distribution with the middle point being 20-40 age group
Also in the book - the "spanish" flu was called that since Spain was the only place with a free press at the time (e.g., US press was not free at the time) + massing of young men in US in camps - like Ft Devens. Flu traveled from overcrowded camp to camp and then jumped to local populations along rail lines (and then overseas as troops were shipped out)
He describes it well, though would make a great visual as it moves from Boston to Chicago to NYC back into Providence/Brockton (which are just south of Boston). Transmission along rail (and shipping) lines.
Yes, this was a big reason why it was initially named the Spanish Flu. At the time that it began (with the war still on) Spain was one of the few countries that did not have very stringent press censorship in place.
This is discussed in several sources, but this is the one I had most readily available:
"In a month or two everyone outside of Spain was calling it "Spanish influenza," not because it originated there, but probably because Spain, still a nonbelligerent, had no wartime censorship to keep its health problems secret from the world. An estimated eight million Spaniards caught flu in May and June. The Spanish claimed that it had come from the battlefields of France, blown over by the strong winter winds, and that it would have been even worse but for the snowy Pyrenees."
America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby
I don't have a ready source, but the press in the US would usually comply with a request to censor news that some in government worried would lead to panic, blame, or accountability. Continued well into the 60's and 70's, and still present today.
But IIRC there were dramatically more strict restrictions during WWI. Certainly in all the european countries busy fighting. (Famously, Bertrand Russell got himself locked up for six months for giving a lecture about whether the US should enter the war.)
>Laboratory studies on the reconstructed 1918 virus began in August 2005. A report of this work, “Characterization of the Reconstructed 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic Virus”, was published in the October 7, 2005, issue of Science.14 To evaluate the 1918 virus’ pathogenicity (i.e., the ability of the virus to cause disease and harm a host), animal studies involving mice were conducted. The mice were infected with the 1918 virus, and measures of morbidity (i.e., weight loss, virus replication, and 50% lethal dose titers) were collected and documented. For comparison, other mice were infected with different influenza viruses that were designed via reverse genetics to have varying combinations of genes from the 1918 virus and contemporary human seasonal influenza A(H1N1) viruses. These viruses are called “recombinant viruses.”
>The fully reconstructed 1918 virus was striking in terms of its ability to quickly replicate, i.e., make copies of itself and spread infection in the lungs of infected mice. For example, four days after infection, the amount of 1918 virus found in the lung tissue of infected mice was 39,000 times higher than that produced by one of the comparison recombinant flu viruses.
The referenced page goes on to detail how various parts of the 1918 virus contributed to virulence. I've seen articles that said that the reason 20-40 year old patient had more severe disease is that their immune systems were stronger, and that the lung damage is actually caused by the immune system combating the virus.
The 1918 virus started out earlier during WW I. During that time, large groups of men were being transported internationally by troop ships. While trains and ships are slower than airplanes a journey from a camp in the US to one in France probably took under two weeks.
Aside from the other points people have made, the main hypothesis is that the 1918 flu was similar to previous pandemics which the older were exposed to when they were young, so they already had some resistance. The 20-40 year olds were unlucky in that this was their first exposure.
It's worth mentioning that the article doesn't specify if that age group had a higher mortality % per infected, or just a higher mortality total. I'm assuming they meant the first, anyone know for sure?
Hmm, timeline is very US focused, I guess for obvious reasons, but would have loved to seen more about how it moved about the world from its US starting point.
Definitely very US focused. Misses out on some of the areas where the pandemic had the most devastating effects.
One interesting story from The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry:
"Freetown, Sierra Leone, was a major coaling center on the West African coast, servicing ships traveling from Europe to South Africa and the Orient. On August 15 the HMS Mantua arrived there with two hundred crew suffering from influenza. Sweating black men loaded tons of coal into her, guided by several crew. When the laborers returned to their homes, they carried more than their wages. Soon influenza spread through the force of men who coaled the ships. [...] The transport HMS Chepstow Castle, carrying troops from New Zealand to the front, coaled at Freetown on August 26 and 27; within three weeks, out of her 1,150 men, influenza struck down nine hundred of them. The death toll on her was thirty-eight. "
"The transport HMS Chepstow Castle, carrying troops from New Zealand to the front, coaled at Freetown on August 26 and 27; within three weeks, out of her 1,150 men, influenza struck down nine hundred of them."
This doesn't sound right, so I looked into it. It could have been the HMS Chepstow (Chepstow Castle seems to have been cancelled from Wikipedia), but other sources [1] put the fatality number at 68 for that sailing which sounds more realistic.
900 out of 1150 would be above Ebola rates and that would have been very quick for such a mortality rate.
Edit: Actually your source was correct, you just cut them off early which gave a very misleading impression, it said 38 of them died. Always good to be critical....
A while ago, I did a piece of armchair research on Spanish flu in Austria-Hungary [1]. TL;DR: the dates it occurred throughout the empire differ insignificantly.
The linked blog post shows also a table with the week of highest mortality in North America, Great Britain, continental Europe, and India, copied from an old book.
