It’s hard to believe, but this month marks the third anniversary of the lockdowns triggered by Covid-19; three years since the World Health Organization referred to the outbreak as a pandemic. Although the virus is still here and the emergency is not over, we have made remarkable progress when it comes to diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.
But the devastating Covid pandemic was not the first major outbreak to hit America. In this week’s video clips, two history professors shed light on previous health-related tragedies that ravaged the country, highlighting some remarkable connections between these past catastrophes and our current crisis.
Did Yellow Fever Help Form Modern Political Parties?
Does the government have the right to tell us to wear masks? Should we stop going to work? Is social distancing really necessary? These are just a few of the questions we’ve grappled with since the onset of the Covid pandemic. But they are some of the same questions our founding fathers faced during the yellow fever crisis that struck Philadelphia, the interim capital city, in 1793.
In his fascinating class “The First American Pandemic (Over 200 Years Ago),” Lynn University Professor Robert Watson dives into the details of the outbreak, the ensuing devastation and the lessons learned from this first American crisis. With eerie parallels to our modern debates surrounding Covid, this clip explains how the yellow fever crisis was politicized, as two separate factions–forerunners of today’s political parties–argued over health care practices and disease management.
“Halt the Epidemic! Stop Spitting, Everybody!”
Barbers cutting hair outdoors. Instructions in the newspaper explaining how to make your own face mask. Large public gatherings that became “super-spreader events.” These images conjure memories from the past three years, but they also appear in Professor Jennifer Keene’s presentation “The 1918 Flu Epidemic: What We Know Now.” Despite the similarities between this war-time tragedy and our modern Covid epidemic, the 1918 flu was far more deadly, infecting 500 million–about a third of the world’s population at the time–and killing between 50 and 100 million. In this video clip, Professor Keene explains why.
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