The Coronavirus is tracking like the Spanish Flu of 1918 - Beware the Autumn of 2020 [View all]

[Joe Nation]

At the end of WWI, soldiers on both sides returned home already infected with the Spanish Flu. The trench warfare had spawned more than a new way to fight a war, it had also spawned a deadly virus that would kill between 50 and 100 million people world-wide. But that didn't happen the spring of 1918 when the war ended, it took until the following fall for the pandemic to really ramp up.

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The first wave wasn’t that bad. In the spring of 1918, a new strain of influenza hit military camps in Europe on both sides of World War I. Soldiers were affected, but not nearly as severely as they would be later.

Even so, Britain, France, Germany and other European governments kept it secret. They didn’t want to hand the other side a potential advantage.

Spain, on the other hand, was a neutral country in the war. When the disease hit there, the government and newspapers reported it accurately. Even the king got sick.

So months later, when a bigger, deadlier wave swept across the globe, it seemed like it had started in Spain, even though it hadn’t. Simply because the Spanish told the truth, the virus was dubbed the “Spanish flu.”

Now, as fears about the coronavirus spread, at least one historian is worried the Trump administration is failing to heed the lesson of one of the world’s worst pandemics: Don’t hide the truth.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/02/29/1918-flu-coronavirus-trump/