The Irish Examiner View: A new pandemic in a more capable world

Sometimes, comparisons stretching across time can be so unsettling that we intuitively avoid making them — publicly at least. That, however, does not make them any less relevant or any less useful. Or indeed any less pressing.

This morning, even as Spring’s widening smile warms the countryside, comparisons between today’s pandemic and the one of a century ago are ever more unavoidable. How might it be otherwise? The world cannot, even if it wished to, disremember such a traumatic event.

The Spanish flu pandemic, which lasted from January 1918 to December 1920, infected 500m people. That was more than a quarter of the world’s population which was below 2bn at that time. That population has reached 7.53bn and is climbing relentlessly. There are almost as many people in China now, its population hovers just below 1.5bn, as there were in the world in 1920.

That pandemic wreaked havoc for nearly three years and claimed an estimated 50m lives.Of those, 23,000 were lost in Ireland while some 800,000 people were infected here over a 12-month period. Almost 14m people died in British-controlled India underlining the consequences and vulnerabilities of poverty — and subjugation too.

In comparison, WWI took 20m lives; about 9.7m military personnel and around 10m civilians. Though these figures are dramatic, the life, the enduring length of the pandemic, almost a full three years, is this morning every bit as daunting.

Though the maths are not complicated, it is all too easy to extrapolate a dystopian figure for deaths, our situation today is very, very different. We have almost limitless resources compared to the world of 1920, a world impoverished and divided by years of war and revolution.

We have communications technologies and capacity simply unknown, much less imagined in 1920. This technology will, and is, playing a central role in the fight against coronavirus. It plays a hugely important role, especially in the short term, by preparing us psychologically for what may lie ahead.

It would have been far more difficult to establish and sustain social isolation policies in communities reliant on the communications of a century ago. Uncertainty and incomprehension around the scale of pandemic, hubris too, might have hindered essential measures.

However, harrowing, heartrending footage from Spain or Italy close down any opposition to those policies and their enforcement today.

Yesterday’s news that the number of outbreaks in nursing homes has jumped to 38 was known across the country withing minutes of the HSE announcement, immediately provoking a preventative response. Those moves might have taken many days if not weeks to implement a century ago.

Yesterday’s request from the Alzheimer Society that people be kind to those with dementia if they, unknowingly, breach social distancing guidelines might have taken days to filter down in 1920 but not today.

That old cynicism — “the more things change the more they stay the same” — is found out . The people of 1920 might recognise coronavirus but they could not recognise our capacity to respond to it and to ultimately defeat it.

[snippet1]987600[/snippet1]