Guest post: A pattern of forgetting
Originally a comment by Arnaud on A couple of markers.
In 1957/1958, a flu pandemic (the Hong Kong flu) caused up to 3 million deaths worldwide, 100,000 in France alone. It circled the world in less than six months and caused untold misery. Like COVID19, most of the death occurred among older people (over 65) but, at a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is now, that didn’t shock that much, maybe. How to explain that the devastation was so quickly forgotten?
So quickly forgotten that when what was pretty much the same virus came back in 1968, the same mistakes were made, the same complacency prevailed and the same results were seen: a worldwide death toll of between 1 and 4 million.
Then, THAT pandemic was in its turn swiftly forgotten. I myself was born in 1970 and I must admit, I’d never heard of it until a couple of months ago. That’s two pandemics that the people experienced and didn’t care to remember.
So there is, definitely, a pattern of forgetting, of erasement of these events from our collective memories. It doesn’t have to be so, the memory can be kept alive: one of the reasons a lot of Asian countries did much better in fighting COVID was their own memories of SARS nearly 20 years but the effects can be perverse. While governments and people who lived through it in China, Hong Kong, Viet Nam remembered it vividly, the rest of the world, who never was affected much thanks to stringent security measures, dismissed it too easily as scaremongering. (The same thing happened with the 2K bug!)
I don’t know why this happens to be honest, this forgetting. You could say there is a certain fatalism, a tendency to accept epidemics as a fact of life but surely that cannot be entirely the case, how can you accept as a fact of life something you refuse to remember? Maybe because, as OB hints, there are no great stories, no great deeds and derring-dos or at least none that the entertainment industry care to commemorate?
As an aside, I remember the 1918 flu epidemic (not personally of course!) and so do a lot of people here in Europe. I cannot speak about the US but in my opinion this one left an imprint. Mind you, it was particularly awful.
I remember the ’57 Chyna flu very well — missed 3 or 4 days of school [only absences between 3rd grade when I got ALL the childhood diseases, and graduation from HS], and all systems were not ‘go’.
Oddly, I can’t recall catching flu in the 60+ years since. Must have, though I have ‘usually’ taken flu jabs past couple decades, but nothing memorable, nothing worse than upper respiratory stuff without aches and GI issues.
I wonder if the issue is the death rate, rather than the overall deaths. Overall deaths can be shocking, but unless you see the big picture, it’s not in your face. An illness like Ebola is very feared because of the death rate (most who caught it died), and both SARS and MERS were far more deadly than the others you list above. Plus, you can still say “it’s just the flu”, which most of the time is a passing illness, not a terrifying death sentence. I wonder if we would have reacted differently if they were called “COVID pneumonia”, or similar?
I find that a lot of people have never heard of it at all, not just dismissing it as “just the flu”. I do a lab with my students every year where we visit the cemetery and record death dates, etc, to see if there are any patterns in the life expectancy. They will get back in the van after filling out their paper and breathlessly inform me that they found several places where there were whole families who died within days of each other – ‘even the children!’. When I ask them what year, it’s always 1918. That’s usually the first they’ve heard of the flu pandemic. It’s not the sort of thing that is deemed important enough to teach in history classes, which I suspect is the habit we have of thinking of history, as I think someone said on the original post, as a series of stories about great men (or evil men) doing great things (or evil things). My class is often the first time the kids know about the plague that wiped out so much of the European population, too. They know George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Christopher Columbus, and that’s about it.
Arcadia, you are probably right here; after all even 100,000 deaths is still a very small percentage of the general population for a country like the UK or France. Here in the UK it’s only recently that I heard of somebody I knew dying of COVID. And to my distress (I grow increasingly curmudgeonly as I age!) I know quite a lot of people!
All of the articles I read about the epidemics of 1958 and 1968 also emphasised the fact that the victims were predominantly old people and that the death rates were dismissed at first (by that I mean at the time the epidemics took place) because, after all, dying is what old people do. Even now that is still a worryingly common point of view!
By contrast SARS and MERS, and definitely Ebola are a lot less discriminating as well as a lot more deadly. The 1918 flu epidemic occurred at a time when a lot of people were in no shape to fight of the virus. To see young and healthy people die suddenly will always leave a more lasting impression.