Slightly more than one hundred years separate the 1918 influenza epidemic and our covid-19 troubles. A CDC page offers the guess that about 10% of people infected died from influenza — maybe 50 million worldwide. Covid-19 has killed fewer, though it is still taking lives (as is the flu). As of 2022 the World Health Organization blamed covid for 15 million deaths.
In a memoir that also includes digging into the history of her own Berkeley neighborhood Barbara Gates talks to a woman who collects oral histories. These lines about the influenza epidemic struck me:
‘One woman we interviewed just around the corner from here talked about the 1918 influenza epidemic and how it killed everybody off. At the Niehaus house, over on Delaware, everybody in that great big house died of influenza. Every last one. ‘
We live with flu these days. We’re living with covid. There are vaccines. Some people get a shot as soon as it’s available. Some are sure the vaccines are worse than the disease. I’m of the former camp. The recommended measures against covid have done me pretty good. Colds and flus, a stuffed up head, a fever that wracked me with bad dreams — I used to get whatever came through. Since 2020 I have had only the mildest forms of these, a couple of days of runny nose that I could nevertheless breathe through, a soft cough, a tickle in the throat. If I ever caught covid itself it was the (possibly mythical) asymptomatic variety.
Whether it was washing my hands more frequently, wearing a filter mask in crowded places, or the vaccines, I now know that I don’t have to take for granted suffering through the seasonal bugs. I like it!
source:
Already Home: a topography of spirit and place
by Barbara Gates
2003. Shambala, Boston MA
2 comments:
Neither Carrie nor I have had COVID. We actually began isolating oirselves before the government imposed a lockdown and have accepted every jab available since. One of the benefits of being old here are annual flu jabs which we always take advantage of in fact I've only ever had the flu proper—not man-flu—once in my life and it floored me. Anyone who says they've had a "touch' of the flu is talking utter tripe. Of course, the annual flu jab is now an annual flu/COVID jab and it looks like this is the future.
I've always been unclear on the distinction between cold and flu. Supposedly if you have a fever, it's a flu. I have had some really miserable colds, then. And some nasty flus. I have had touches and clobberings. Strep throat, that was the worst -- felt like every swallow was a serrated knife rather than saliva.
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