Skip to main content

Another look at the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Today, we'll be taking another look at the 1918 Flu Pandemic through the lens of our 2020 CoViD-19 pandemic, specifically the coverage and information in the Holland City News Archive.

If we take the 2006 article written by Morens and Taubenberger (cited below), the pandemic's first wave (of three waves) wa described in the United States, beginning in March of 1918. What I find interesting about this is that the Holland City News first mentions the event in October, specifically the October 10 issue. I used the search engine on Hope's digitalcommons website, using the keywords "flu" and "influenza" in their 1918 HCN section.

Figure 1 in the article by Moren and Taubenberger show three distinct peaks in flu deaths: One in July, a second in late October or early November, and a third in late February or early March 1919. Going off of last week's article, we know that Holland had closed churches and gone into quarantine by October 31, yet a short three weeks before, the cities of Zeeland and Holland had reported no deaths: "Although Spanish Influenza has as yet claimed no victims in Holland or Zeeland, it has claimed a man well known in both places in the person of Prof. Herbert Keppel of Gainsville, Florida."

It's a stark contrast to the 2020 pandemic. I can wake up, and before I've even eaten my breakfast, be informed with the "latest developments on Coronavirus in Michigan" from MLive.com. As of 7am local time, the article has current stats and numbers on all confirmed cases and deaths in the state. While churches were cancelled in 1918, and special arrangements had to be made to deliver bulletins to church members, I can pull up livestreams of many different churches and access their bulletins digitally via their websites today. Holland City News only published once a week. I can look at Google Trends going back to 2004 and track the searches that Google has recorded for the term "coronavirus," which were nigh on nonexistent until January 2020, then skyrocketed between February and March.




Works Cited:

Google Trends, trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=coronavirus&geo=US.

Holland City News, "Holland City News, Volume 47, Number 41: October 10, 1918" (1918). Holland City News: 1918. 41. https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1918/41

Holland City News, "Holland City News, Volume 47, Number 44: October 31, 1918" (1918). Holland City News: 1918. 44. https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1918/44

Morens, David M. and Taubenberger, Jeffery K. 1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics. Bethesda, MD: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0979_article

Taylor tdesorme@mlive.com - https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/wednesday-april-8-latest-developments-on-coronavirus-in-michigan.html?utm_campaign=mlive_sf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Eddie Bentz Bank Robbery

Prohibition is one of the most storied periods in American history. Urban myths and legends abound nationwide, with tales of folk heroes like Al Capone, Babyface Nelson, and John Dillinger. Tall tales are woven around organized crime, wild bootleggers, underground saloons, and well-dressed gangsters. There's something uniquely American about the DIY ethos of taking matters into your own hands, making illegal alcohol, and selling it through clandestine channels; stickin' it to the man like those in the illegal alcohol industry did. These stories are immortalized in movies like The Road To Perdition and Public Enemies, as well as TV series like HBO's Boardwalk Empire and, well, PBS's Prohibition. Many lakeshore towns in Western Michigan have tales of organized crime and bootlegging. Easy access to Lake Michigan meant that bootleggers had easy access to boat routes, safely out of reach of authorities. Booze was funneled in from Canada, then taken by boat to cities all aro...
Post a Comment
Read more

XFinity Sucks. Or, Why I'm Excited For Holland BPW Fiber To Come Through Our Neighborhood

 The whole thing started in October - we hit the data cap for our XFinity plan in 2 or 3 days. I didn't know we had a data cap on our XFinity plan, so I was befuddled. Problem is, you can't just call XFinity, you must escalate your ticket up their chain of command: Start with their AI chatbot, escalate to a human typing on the other end of the chatroom, get transferred to an AI phone operator, escalate that to any number of human phone operators. Somewhere in that initial escalation, they discovered that we weren't on an actual plan from them, and the services we had weren't even offered by them anymore - our account had slipped through the cracks. Their "solution" to the massive data leak was to give sell us the premium tier service with no data cap...which didn't actually solve anything, it just passed the buck down the road. By October 6 or 7, we had blown through another terrabyte of data, so I reached out to Customer Service agai...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Melon Heads of Felt Mansion

The Melonheads of Saugatuck Dunes are a truly unique bit of local lore and urban legend. While most urban legends have a grain of truth in them, my research into the Melonheads has turned up many dead-ends and false leads. Here's what we know for sure: Felt Mansion was built by Dorr E. Felt, a wealthy businessman from Chicago, situated on Shore Acres Farm (present location of Saugatuck Dunes State Park). Within a few days of being completed in 1928, Agnes Felt passed away. Within a year and a half, Dorr Felt himself passed away, in 1930. This is all freely available information from Allegan County. In 1949, the estate was sold by the family to the Archdiocese of Chicago and was used as a seminary, called Saint Augustine Seminary. By 1962, cloistered nuns moved in, and a boarding school was established. This is all verifiable by Archdiocese of Chicago records, and by yearbooks, available at Herrick District Library in Holland. The Seminary was closed and the property was sold t...
Post a Comment
Read more