The Spanish Flu of 1918 was widely unknown to me before today’s reading and video. The Spanish Flu was the world’s most recent large pandemic, claiming upwards of fifty million lives in a few short years. The parallels between the COVID pandemic and the Spanish Flu are clearly discussed by Noah in the video, but the article was originally published in 2010 and mainly focuses on the Spanish Flu. I think it is important to understand the biases of the media outlets distributing the information. We have learned how important it is to know your source because the same fact can be interpreted in different ways to get a different reaction from the reader. The video is from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, which is definitely a left-biased source. The point of the video was to show the parallels between the two pandemics and how our current administration has failed to address the same problems from 1918 and properly flatten the curve. Noah uses humor to poke fun at different aspects of the situation, but the stance is clearly left. The Spanish Flu article by History.com was not as politically charged because it was not originally written during the current pandemic and was solely written to inform readers about the Spanish Flu.
The Spanish Flu was much more deadly than I thought prior to reading this article. One staggering way to illustrate the severity of this flu is to look at the average life expectancy in countries in 1918. All over the world and in the US, the average life expectancy plummeted by decades due to the exponential increase in deaths of young people. The world was becoming globalized and interconnected but did not have the modern healthcare treatments to deal with the flu. It amazes me how a pandemic can affect the world so drastically but we still struggle to learn from our mistakes. Americans must educate themselves on the Spanish Flu and see that they practiced social distancing and wore masks over 100 years ago. When state governments failed to properly deal with the pandemic, like in Philadelphia, the consequences were deadly. This is a prime example of why studying history is so important because learning from history can prevent future problems.
I too though that it was interesting that two different sources talking about the same pandemic approached it from such different perspectives, as the youtube video was very obviously politically biased. Secondly, I agree with you that it is shocking how little we learn from our mistakes throughout history. World war 1 was supposed to be “the war to end all wars”, but WW2 happened not too long after. I really hope that we look at the Spanish flu and try to get ahead of the second wave of Covid.
Like you, I also was generally ignorant of the Spanish Flu before preparing for today’s class. All I had learned in school was that the Spanish Flu killed a lot of people at the end of World War 1. I did not learn about the politics of the pandemic which is something that would have been insightful to have known over the past few months. I think looking to the past can help determine what should concern us, what shouldn’t concern us, and how we can improve in the future.