Mar 22, 2020 3 min read

We will get through this.

There are no guarantees about when the comforts and security of the lives we enjoyed as recently as two weeks ago will return, but rest assured: Someday, and hopefully sooner rather than later, the coronavirus will be tamed and we will be able to dine out, attend a concert and get groceries without feeling like we are taking an undue risk. It might take a while, but with any luck efforts now to hunker down and limit contact with other people will get us closer to something resembling normalcy again.

Certainly part of the reason people in the industrialized West feel such a deep sense of dislocation thanks to the coronavirus is that we lead relatively privileged lives. Science and medicine have extended our lives and removed many of the worries and difficulties that were once regular features of human existence. No matter how devastating the coronavirus is, it’s unlikely to match the Black Death that swept through Europe from 1347 to 1353 and killed an estimated 50 million people. At the height of a plague in London in 1665 and 1666, as many as 8,000 people were dying every week.

The most recent precedent we have for a pandemic that packed as lethal a punch as the coronavirus is the influenza pandemic of 1918 that arrived as World War I was winding down. In October 1918, it made Washington a ghost town, just as it has been for the last several days here in 2020. All the saloons, dance halls and “motion picture establishments,” as they were called in those days, were shuttered. Probably unwisely, children stayed in classrooms, but teachers were urged to ventilate them and children were encouraged to use individual drinking cups and use handkerchiefs when they sneezed. Schools were later closed as cases cropped up across Washington County and the Washington County Golf and Country Club was remade as an emergency hospital.

And, just as it looks like Easter celebrations this year will likely not come to pass, the 1918 flu pandemic claimed Halloween. The Washington Reporter stated, “There is much sickness over town, and parents are urged to be careful … to see that homes where there is sickness are not visited, or unseemly noises made about such homes.”

One of the casualties of the 1918 flu pandemic was a young man named Charles Miller, who lived on Allison Avenue in Washington. Just 20, he was shipped off to Europe to fight in the war, and died just 10 days after he arrived due to influenza and pneumonia. His body was interred near the Irish coast.

If there’s any comfort to be had, we know much more about sanitation and nutrition than we did in 1918, and that will help people keep the coronavirus at bay, or help them recover if they catch it. Our cities are also less crowded.

We learned lessons from the 1918 pandemic. If we are wise, we’ll learn lessons from this one, too.