Tuesday, May 05, 2020

Class war in the Spanish Flu pandemic


Sandra Bloodworth 20 March 2020 RED FLAG AU
Lots of people are thinking about the Spanish flu right now. That pandemic of the past didn't just cause mass death. It also led to class struggle.


“We were supposed to be evolving, and the millennium was only a question of time. And what happened? It was found that instead of being perfect, civilization was turned into a shambles. What an interruption to theories and optimistic fantasies. Heaven was to arrive – and lo, it was hell that came!”
– Presbyterian Messenger, late 1919

The Spanish flu, which devastated the world in several waves between 1918 and 1920, was not particularly Spanish. In fact, it likely originated in the US. The first record of the condition was in an April 1918 public health report informing officials of 18 severe cases and three deaths in Haskell, Kansas. By May, hundreds of thousands of US soldiers had sailed across the Atlantic, spreading the deadly flu across Europe and into Africa and Asia. It was not the illness’s origin that gave it its title, but the response of authorities to the disaster.

The authors of a 2005 paper delivered to the US Institute of Medicine Forum on Microbial Threats found: “Every country engaged in World War I tried to control public perception [of the flu outbreak]. To avoid hurting morale, even in the nonlethal first wave the press in countries fighting in the war did not mention the outbreak”. But because Spain was not at war, its press reported the unfolding disaster, with the Spanish king being an early, much publicised victim. Spain was the first country in which political realities permitted the pandemic’s acknowledgement, rather than its origin.

Much like today, most governments in 1918 tried to downplay the threat, pretending that their country wouldn’t be in danger. In the US, a law was passed that made it punishable by 20 years in jail to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States”, including cursing or criticising the government, even if it was true. One congressman was jailed.

The architect of massive government propaganda proclaimed: “Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms ... There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other ... The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false”.

Does Trump hear echoes of this wisdom as he lies and says that everyone can have a test if they want, when there is a patent lack of clinics to do even the minimum? Or when he asserted that the virus would be under control in a few days when it was just beginning to spread?

The report’s authors conclude of 1918-19: “[A] combination of rigid control and disregard for truth had dangerous consequences. Focusing on the shortest term, local officials almost universally told half-truths or outright lies to avoid damaging morale and the war effort. They were assisted – not challenged – by the press, which although not censored in a technical sense cooperated fully with the government's propaganda machine”.

In Philadelphia, when the public health commissioner closed all schools, houses of worship, theatres and other public gathering places, one newspaper thundered that this order was “not a public health measure” and reiterated that “there is no cause for panic or alarm”. But these reassurances rang hollow as neighbours, friends and spouses died horrible deaths.

Dead bodies remained in homes for days, until eventually open trucks or horse-drawn carts were sent down city streets and relatives were told to bring out the dead. The bodies were stacked without coffins and buried in mass graves.

Between 50 and 100 million had died by the time the virus finally petered out in 1920, according to epidemiological studies. This was out of a world population of just over 1.8 billion. A similar mortality rate today would mean 175-350 million deaths. Epidemiologists claim it lowered life expectancy in the US by 12 years. In Australia, around 15,000 died in a population of 5 million.

These figures reduce to mere numbers what was unimaginable horror. A physician at one typical US army camp wrote:

“These men start with what appears to be an ordinary attack of LaGrippe or Influenza, and ... a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes ... It is horrible ... to see these poor devils dropping like flies ... We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day ... We have lost an outrageous number of Nurses and Drs. It takes special trains to carry away the dead. For several days there were no coffins and the bodies piled up something fierce ... It beats any sight they ever had in France after a battle.”

With no effective drugs to treat the virus, scientists concluded:

“Some nonmedical interventions did succeed. Total isolation, cutting a community off from the outside world, did work if done early enough. Gunnison, Colorado, a town that was a rail center and was large enough to have a college, succeeded in isolating itself. So did Fairbanks, Alaska. American Samoa escaped without a single case, while a few miles away in Western Samoa, 22 percent of the entire population died.

“More interestingly – and perhaps importantly – an Army study found that isolating both individual victims and entire commands that contained infected soldiers ‘failed when and where [these measures] were carelessly applied,’ but ‘did some good ... when and where they were rigidly carried out.’”

The first cargo vessel carrying infected seamen arrived in Australian waters in October 1918, prompting the government to impose a seven days quarantine on ships from South African or New Zealand ports. Over the next three months in the Sydney quarantine stations, 300 cases were treated, with “numerous” deaths.

The unfolding tragedy was met with dishonesty and incompetence. The director of quarantine claimed to be convinced that by June 1919 they had created a situation of “absolute immunity”. The left wing historian Humphrey McQueen, who studied the pandemic in Australia, comments, “Dr J. H. L. Cumpston based this view on the fact that four weeks elapsed ‘between the arrival of the last infected ship and the first shore case notified.’ This would be strong evidence indeed if he did not elsewhere have cause to complain of medical officers on troop ships falsifying their records to avoid protracted quarantine.”

Some states closed their borders quickly, others later, leading to squabbling about who was responsible for new outbreaks and what could traverse borders. Shipping companies, in league with various governments, tried to subvert quarantine rules, resulting in acrimonious disputes about who was entitled to which trade. None of this conflict even considered what was best for the sailors and the population at large.

A big difference with Australia today was the restless spirit among returned soldiers who had looked into the gates of hell, urged on with promises of a golden future after the war. And workers had unions that actually saw their reason for existence as improving the lot of their members.

Industrial militancy had been strong since a general strike in 1917. Feelings among militant workers intensified in response to the contradictions between government measures intended to contain the spread of the flu, such as a ban on large gatherings, and employers’ demands to work in appalling conditions. In spite of government orders that only 20 people should be in a room together, for instance, the owners of the ship Loongana insisted on 24 sleeping in what a Board of Health inspector described as “dog kennel accommodation”.

Strong, militant unions did not accept any of this without vigorous resistance. The waterside workers and seamen were in the forefront of danger, with ships arriving carrying potentially infectious people. And they were also in the forefront of militant class consciousness.

In January 1919 seamen on the Arawatta moored in Moreton Bay walked off and refused to sign on again until they got conditions won by New Zealand crews. This included a 35 shillings a month wage increase, insurance of 500 pounds for families of workers killed by the flu, and full pay if they were quarantined or in hospital. Seamen refused to continue on the Cooma from Brisbane without these claims being met, in what was a wildcat strike. Shipping companies responded by leaving at least four ships in Queensland lying idle.

Transport workers in Sydney met and put all the same demands to employers. Waterside workers followed suit, also demanding cleaner facilities for meal breaks and washing and an extension of insurance protection to nurses, ambulance bearers and other occupations more likely to be at risk.

For the sake of business, some employers granted many of the claims, but the government would only guarantee wages of those in quarantine or hospital.

The 1919 Fremantle Wharf riot, also known as “bloody Sunday” or the “Battle of the Barricades”, was sparked by anger at ship owners’ reckless disregard for the health of waterside workers, inflamed by wider bitterness about low wages, casualised work and terrible conditions. A memorial fountain, sculpted by Pietro Porcelli in Perth’s Kings Square, pays tribute to Tom Edwards, killed by a cop during the riot. In the book Radical Perth, Militant Fremantle, Bobbie Oliver describes the events:

“On 4 May 1919, over a thousand wharf labourers (or lumpers as they were known), their wives and children had mobbed the wharf, thrown bricks at the Premier, faced armed police and seen one of their own killed and others injured ...

“For several days after the event, police officers feared for their safety on the streets of Fremantle. The funeral of Tom Edwards ... brought not only Fremantle but also the whole state to a standstill.”

The Dimboola had sailed into Fremantle in April carrying infected passengers. The state government, pressured by the prime minister to subvert their own quarantine period, organised scabs to unload it. They built the barricades that gave the event its name, to protect themselves. The Freemantle Lumpers Union, bearing the paradoxical acronym FLU, mobilised on the fateful day to stop scabs brought in boats down the river.

In May 1919 the Seamen’s Union went on the attack after confrontations and strikes in Queensland over wages, attempts to enforce quarantine of ships and the demands other ports had raised. Conflicts in a number of ports culminated in a four-month-long maritime strike. The seamen’s journal in Queensland suggested employing the “steel-fisted irony of the wobblies”, in McQueen’s words. If seamen got flu in any number, “they must immediately stroll up to the owner’s office and sneeze violently altogether at once. The owner will then immediately ... personally conduct you to his private hospital, calling at hotels en route, where you will receive every attention”.

With no vaccine and a health system even more woefully inadequate than today, the confused and outright despicable responses of governments and employers, determined to defend profits above all else, resulted in appalling misery for the mass of workers. Governments and employers determinedly resisted workers’ demands to be treated with some dignity.

Ideologically they attempted to combat the anger and radicalism by linking the crisis to the scourge of Bolshevism, see it as an opportunity to discredit the Russian Revolution, which had inspired millions to believe in the possibility of a better world.

One pamphleteer observed that the historical synchronisation between “epidemics of disease and epidemics of crime and social disorders” was being repeated as “the mysterious physical poison of influenza” emerged simultaneously with “a vast deluge of moral and mental poison, under the name of Bolshevism”.

Workers could not win everything, but they made substantial gains in pay and support for those unable to work. Critically, their struggles ensured the continuance of a militant minority determined to fight for workers’ rights and against the scourge of capitalism. This is an important lesson for today.

A Snapshot of the 1918 Global Influenza Pandemic in Russia

Judging by my social media feed, several folks with an interest in Russian history have been asking themselves “Hmm, I wonder what happened in Russia during the 1918 global influenza pandemic?” Many moons ago, when researching medical care and medical personnel during World War I for my book Imperial Apocalypse, I had the same question. At that time, I found very little work on the question, either in English or in Russian, though I may have missed something then or something might have been published more recently. (And if there is something out there, please reach out and let me know. I’m interested!)
I did some archival research on this question, though it was limited both by the fact that the flu struck right after the period (summer of 1918) at which I was wrapping up my story and by the scattered nature of some of this material. As is often the case, much of the research I did ended up on the cutting room floor, and I had only a couple of sentences in Imperial Apocalypse that dealt with it:
“As 1917 turned to 1918, and then throughout the rest of the Civil War, the Whites, Reds, and warlords all failed to create the conditions of state support and personal security necessary for vibrant economic institutions to re-emerge. People were hungry and cold. Then, increasingly, they starved and froze to death. As they weakened, they sickened further. Each month saw an increase in the number of people hospitalized, and epidemic diseases became more prevalent. In the summer of 1918, cholera ripped through cities like Iaroslavl. By October, the global influenza pandemic was hitting other towns in the Golden Ring like Rybinsk and the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin alike. Many Russians no sooner recovered from one disease than the next one struck.” (p. 256)
My mention of Rybinsk, a town just north of Iaroslavl, was of course not accidental. One of the sources I found was a set of records from a “flying detachment of the Red Cross for the fight against epidemics in the city of Rybinsk” from the summer and fall of 1918. (GARF f. R-4094 op. 1 d. 137). I entered these data into a spreadsheet to see the ways that disease hit at least one medical facility in at least one city in this critical period. My basic takeaway was that, in Rybinsk at least, the flu was just the latest and not the most lethal of the epidemics to affect the town. The flu first made its appearance into the records in October 1918 as the “Spanish Illness,” though by December it was more correctly labeled as “Influenza.” In October, 17 people were treated, 7 were released, and 10 were still in the clinic. In November, 10 more people became ill, 14 were released, 1 was still in care, and 5 had died. In December, 7 more cases appeared, but by the end of the month all 8 patients had recovered and been released. In sum, then, 34 people in Rybinsk were treated for the flu by this flying detachment, and 5 of them died. This was, of course, terrible. But just before the flu arrived, there had been a cholera epidemic in the city. From July-September, 284 people were treated by the detachment for cholera, with fully half (142) dying of the disease. Earlier still, in May, June, and July, 55 people had gotten typhus, though only one died.
These numbers offer only partial insight into the dynamics of the epidemic, of course. Epidemics strike unevenly in geographic terms, as we are currently learning. Was Rybinsk more or less affected than other regions? These were the records of a single medical detachment. Were there other medical institutions operating in Rybinsk? If so, did they treat infectious cases or send them directly to the flying detachment? There is narrative evidence given by officials in these records that many of the cholera cases they treated were at death’s door because families tried as much as possible to care for them at home, often infecting themselves in the process. Did they try to do the same with the flu? If so, were there many cases unaccounted for because they got better (or died) without ever seeing a doctor? Did the fact that many young men (a particularly hard-hit group in this pandemic) were serving in the military mean that civilian areas saw a lower impact? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. All I really feel confident in saying is that the social and medical impact of the influenza pandemic likely affected Russia differently than many other areas because of this larger context of mass epidemics and, even more broadly, of state and social collapse.
One more point of interest is that in November, 1918 a request was made to a Smolensk clinic to send weekly reports on the “Spanish disease” both to the oblast department of health and to the regional administration of the Red Cross. Perhaps at least some of those records survive. Maybe, once our current pandemic crisis eases, some historian will be able to fill in some of the many gaps of knowledge we have. In the meantime, stay healthy, my friends!

About Joshua Sanborn

David M. '70 and Linda Roth Professor of History Department of History Lafayette College (Pennsylvania, USA)

Why the Second Wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu Was So Deadly
The first strain of the Spanish flu wasn’t particularly deadly. Then it came back in the fall with a vengeance.

DAVE ROOS UPDATED:APR 29, 2020

PhotoQuest/Getty Images


The horrific scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic—known as the "Spanish flu"—is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims—that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.

While the global pandemic lasted for two years, a significant number of deaths were packed into three especially cruel months in the fall of 1918. Historians now believe that the fatal severity of the Spanish flu’s “second wave” was caused by a mutated virus spread by wartime troop movements.

When the Spanish flu first appeared in early March 1918, it had all the hallmarks of a seasonal flu, albeit a highly contagious and virulent strain. One of the first registered cases was Albert Gitchell, a U.S. Army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, who was hospitalized with a 104-degree fever. The virus spread quickly through the Army installation, home to 54,000 troops. By the end of the month, 1,100 troops had been hospitalized and 38 had died after developing pneumonia.

As U.S. troops deployed en masse for the war effort in Europe, they carried the Spanish flu with them. Throughout April and May of 1918, the virus spread like wildfire through England, France, Spain and Italy. An estimated three-quarters of the French military was infected in the spring of 1918 and as many as half of British troops. Yet the first wave of the virus didn't appear to be particularly deadly, with symptoms like high fever and malaise usually lasting only three days. According to limited public health data from the time, mortality rates were similar to seasonal flu.

How the Spanish Flu Got Its Name


Interestingly, it was during this time that the Spanish flu earned its misnomer. Spain was neutral during World War I and unlike its European neighbors, it didn’t impose wartime censorship on its press. In France, England and the United States, newspapers weren’t allowed to report on anything that could harm the war effort, including news that a crippling virus was sweeping through troops. Since Spanish journalists were some of the only ones reporting on a widespread flu outbreak in the spring of 1918, the pandemic became known as the “Spanish flu.”

Reported cases of Spanish flu dropped off over the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus had run its course. In retrospect, it was only the calm before the storm. Somewhere in Europe, a mutated strain of the Spanish flu virus had emerged that had the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection.

In late August 1918, military ships departed the English port city of Plymouth carrying troops unknowingly infected with this new, far deadlier strain of Spanish flu. As these ships arrived in cities like Brest in France, Boston in the United States and Freetown in west Africa, the second wave of the global pandemic began.

“The rapid movement of soldiers around the globe was a major spreader of the disease,” says James Harris, a historian at Ohio State University who studies both infectious disease and World War I. “The entire military industrial complex of moving lots of men and material in crowded conditions was certainly a huge contributing factor in the ways the pandemic spread.”

Virus Killed the Young, Old and In-Between

Victims of the Spanish flu at a barracks hospital on the campus of Colorado Agricultural College, Fort Collins, Colorado, 1918.
American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs/PhotoQuest/Getty Images

From September through November of 1918, the death rate from the Spanish flu skyrocketed. In the United States alone, 195,000 Americans died from the Spanish flu in just the month of October. And unlike a normal seasonal flu, which mostly claims victims among the very young and very old, the second wave of the Spanish flu exhibited what’s called a “W curve”—high numbers of deaths among the young and old, but also a huge spike in the middle composed of otherwise healthy 25- to 35-year-olds in the prime of their life.

“That really freaked out the medical establishment, that there was this atypical spike in the middle of the W,” says Harris.

READ MORE: How Florence Nightingale’s Hygiene Crusade Saved Millions

Not only was it shocking that healthy young men and women were dying by the millions worldwide, but it was also how they were dying. Struck with blistering fevers, nasal hemorrhaging and pneumonia, the patients would drown in their own fluid-filled lungs.

Only decades later were scientists able to explain the phenomenon now known as “cytokine explosion.” When the human body is being attacked by a virus, the immune system sends messenger proteins called cytokines to promote helpful inflammation. But some strains of the flu, particularly the H1N1 strain responsible for the Spanish flu outbreak, can trigger a dangerous immune overreaction in healthy individuals. In those cases, the body is overloaded with cytokines leading to severe inflammation and the fatal buildup of fluid in the lungs.

British military doctors conducting autopsies on soldiers killed by this second wave of the Spanish flu described the heavy damage to the lungs as akin to the effects of chemical warfare.
Lack of Quarantines Allowed Flu to Spread and Grow

A nurse checking on a patient at the Walter Reed Hospital Flu Ward during the influenza pandemic, circa 1918. Harris & Ewing/Underwood Archives/Getty Images

Harris believes that the rapid spread of Spanish flu in the fall of 1918 was at least partially to blame on public health officials unwilling to impose quarantines during wartime. In Britain, for example, a government official named Arthur Newsholme knew full well that a strict civilian lockdown was the best way to fight the spread of the highly contagious disease. But he wouldn’t risk crippling the war effort by keeping munitions factory workers and other civilians home.

According to Harris’s research, Newsholme concluded that “the relentless needs of warfare justified incurring [the] risk of spreading infection” and encouraged Britons to simply “carry on” during the pandemic.

The public health response to the crisis in the United States was further hampered by a severe nursing shortage as thousands of nurses had been deployed to military camps and the front lines. The shortage was worsened by the American Red Cross’s refusal to use trained African American nurses until the worst of the pandemic had already passed.


READ MORE: When Black Nurses Were Relegated to Care for German POWs
Medical Science Didn't Have the Tools

But one of the chief reasons that the Spanish flu claimed so many lives in 1918 was that science simply didn’t have the tools to develop a vaccine for the virus. Microscopes couldn’t even see something as incredibly small as a virus until the 1930s. Instead, top medical professionals in 1918 were convinced that the flu was caused by a bacterium nicknamed “Pfeiffer’s bacillus.”

After a global flu outbreak in 1890, a German physician named Richard Pfeiffer found that all of his infected patients carried a particular strain of bacteria he called H. influenzae. When the Spanish flu pandemic hit, scientists were intent on finding a cure for Pfeiffer’s bacillus. Millions of dollars were invested in state-of-the-art labs to develop techniques for testing for and treating H. influenzae, all of it for naught.

“This was a huge distraction for medical science,” says Harris.


GALLERY 9 IMAGES

By December 1918, the deadly second wave of the Spanish flu had finally passed, but the pandemic was far from over. A third wave erupted in Australia in January 1919 and eventually worked its way back to Europe and the United States. It’s believed that President Woodrow Wilson contracted the Spanish flu during the World War I peace negotiations in Paris in April 1919.

The mortality rate of the third wave was just as high as the second wave, but the end of the war in November 1918 removed the conditions that allowed the disease to spread so far and so quickly. Global deaths from the third wave, while still in the millions, paled in comparison to the apocalyptic losses during the second wave.
See all pandemic coverage here
BY DAVE ROOS








Mike Davis: Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell

People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But Mike Davis argues that a rapid reopening of the economy would only result in unspeakable tragedy for millions.

Medical workers prepare with personal protective equipment (PPE) before entering a residential building on April 27, 2020 in a neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Spencer Platt / Getty


As we head into the fifth month of the outbreak millions of working families feel like they have been kidnapped and sent to hell.

As unemployment (officially reported) soars toward 30 percent or more, an estimated 20 million more people will fall helplessly below the poverty line. In a recent Pew poll, 60 percent of Latinos reported losing jobs or wages, as did more than half of all workers below the age of thirty. In addition to their jobs, millions will lose everything they had spent their lives working for: homes, pensions, medical coverage, and savings accounts.

Most of us have already lived through a brutal preview of economic collapse: the 2008–09 “Great Recession.” In a span of eighteen months a majority of black and Latino families lost all their net wealth and college grads from non-privileged backgrounds found themselves marooned, seemingly for life, in the low-wage service economy. That’s why so many millions flocked to Bernie Sanders’s New Deal banner. But the threat ahead is mass immiseration and hunger on a scale unseen since 1933.

People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But heeding the siren call of the MAGA demonstrators, puppets on strings manipulated by hedge funds and billionaire casino owners, to “reopen the economy” would only result in tragedy. Consider these points:

Sending millions of people back to work without protection or testing would be a death sentence for thousands. Thirty-four million workers are over fifty-five; ten million of them over sixty-five. Millions more suffer from diabetes, chronic respiratory problems, and so on. Straight from home to work to ICU to morgue.

Millions of our “essential workers” face intolerable hazards because of the shortage of protective equipment. It will be weeks, at best, before there will be an adequate supply for medical workers. Workers in warehouses, markets, and fast food have no guarantee of ever receiving masks, unless legislation compels it. If this is a war, Trump’s refusal to use existing laws to federalize the manufacture of masks and ventilators is a war crime.

The proposal to test people’s blood and then issue back-to-work certificates if they have the right antibodies is mere fantasy at the moment. Washington has allowed more than a hundred different firms to sell serological kits without human trials or FDA certification. The results they give are all over the map, just a mess. It may be weeks or longer before public health workers have reliable diagnostics to use. Even then it would take months to test the workforce and it’s doubtful that enough people would have the antibodies to safely staff all the closed businesses.

The most heroic assumption is that a vaccine could be available by spring 2021, although no one knows how long its conferred immunity would last. Meanwhile, hundreds of research teams and smaller biotech firms are working on medicines that will reduce the risk of respiratory failure and serious heart or kidney damage. But this sprawling scientific experiment lacks coordination and funding from Washington.
Indefinite Lockout

In a sense, we are living in an indefinite lockout, facing an administration that sets a higher priority on destroying the US Postal Service than it does on organizing a crash program to produce the tests, safety equipment, and antivirals that will allow the United States to return to work.

Trump’s accomplices are monsters like Amazon, which in two weeks made Jeff Bezos $25 billion richer, and UnitedHealth Group, the world’s largest health insurance company, whose profits increased by $4.1 billion in the first three months of the pandemic. Medical insurers have experienced a windfall, since most of their enrollees are now unable to book operations or obtain vital treatments.

A volcanic rage is rapidly rising to the surface in this country and we need to harness it to defend and build unions, ensure Medicare for all, and knock the bastards off their gilded thrones.


How We Got Here

Last New Year’s Eve, while we were lifting our glasses, hugging our mates, and singing a few verses of a song written several centuries ago by a Scots revolutionary, Chinese doctors were notifying colleagues around the world that a rapidly increasing number of acute pneumonia cases, clustered around the city of Wuhan, was the result of infections caused by a previously unknown virus.

Within a week it had been gene-sequenced and unmasked as a “coronavirus.” Until 2003, research on this family of viruses had principally responded to the serious diseases they cause in a variety of animals, including livestock and poultry. Only two were known to infect humans, and since they produced only mild colds, researchers at the time considered them insignificant.

Then in 2003 a new viral epidemic started with a traveler in a Chinese airport hotel who passed his infection on to everyone with whom he had contact. Within twenty-four hours the virus had flown to five other countries. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) killed one out of every ten victims.

The SARS pathogen was identified as another coronavirus, passed from bats to small lithe carnivores known as civets, long valued in southern Chinese cuisine. SARS reached thirty countries and caused a full-scale international panic. But it had an Achilles’ heel: it was only contagious at the stage when infected people displayed symptoms like dry coughing, fever, and muscle aches. Because it was so easily recognized, the SARS virus was finally contained.

A similar virus, a kind of mummy’s curse spread by tomb bats to camels, emerged in 2012 and has killed 1,000 people, mainly in the Arabian Peninsula. But it’s mostly spread by direct contact with camels and thus has not been considered a candidate for starting a pandemic.



The Stealth Virus


Researchers hoped that the current killer, a virus known as SARS-C0V-2 and sharing most of its genes with the original SARS, would likewise be simple to identify through correlation with patients’ symptoms. They were disastrously mistaken.

After four months of circulation in the human world, we now know that the virus, unlike its predecessors, flies on the same wings as influenza: spread easily by people without visible signs of illness. The current pathogen has turned out to be a “stealth virus” on a scale far exceeding influenzas and perhaps unprecedented in the annals of microbiology. The Navy has tested almost the entire crew of the stricken aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and discovered that 60 percent of those infected never displayed visible symptoms.

A large universe of undetected cases might be considered good news if infections produced durable immunity, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The dozens of antibody-detecting blood tests that are now in use, all uncertified by the FDA, are producing confusing and contradictory results, making the idea of a back-to-work antibody ID card impossible at the moment.

But most recent research (which can be reviewed at the National Institutes of Health pandemic website, LitCovid) suggests that conferred immunity is very limited and coronavirus could become as entrenched as influenza. Barring dramatic mutations, second and third infections will likely be less dangerous to survivors, but there is as of yet no evidence that they will be any less dangerous to uninfected people in high-risk groups. So COVID-19 will be the monster in our attic for a long time.




They Knew This Was Coming


But the disease is not an eruption of the totally unknown, a biological asteroid. Although its transmissibility was unexpected in a coronavirus, the pandemic otherwise corresponds closely to the scenario long described for an avian flu outbreak.

For nearly a generation the World Health Organization (WHO) and all major governments have been planning how to detect and respond to such a pandemic. There has always been a very clear international understanding of the need for early detection, large stockpiles of emergency medical supplies, and surge capacity in ICU beds. Most important has the been the agreement of WHO members to coordinate their response along guidelines they all had voted to accept. Early containment was crucial: comprehensive testing, contact tracing, and the isolation of suspected cases. Large-scale quarantines, sealing off cities, shutting large sectors of the economy — these should be only last-ditch measures, made unnecessary by extensive planning.

Along these lines, after the arrival of avian flu in 2005 the US government published an ambitious “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” based on the finding that all levels of the American public health system were totally unprepared for a large-scale outbreak. After the swine flu scare in 2009, the strategy was updated, and, in 2017, a week before Trump’s inauguration, outgoing Obama officials and incoming Trump administrators jointly carried out a large-scale simulation that tested the response of federal agencies and hospitals to a pandemic arising in three different scenarios: swine flu, Ebola, and Zika virus.

In the simulation the system, of course, failed to prevent the outbreaks or, for that matter, flatten the curves in time. Part of the problem was detection and coordination. Another was inadequate stockpiles and supply chains with obvious bottlenecks, such as depending on a few overseas factories to produce vital protective equipment. And behind all this lay the failure to aggressively take advantage of revolutionary advances in biological design over the last decade in order to stockpile an arsenal of new antivirals and vaccines.

In other words, the United States was not ready, and the government knew it was not ready.


Dominoes of Disaster
By the end of January 2020 three things had happened. First, the WHO quickly distributed hundreds of thousands of test kits designed by German scientists but otherwise was pushed to the sidelines while each nation bolted its doors and ignored previous commitments to mutual aid.

Second, three East Asian nations with well-prepared medical arsenals and single-payer health systems — South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan — successfully contained outbreaks with minimal mortality and moderate periods of social isolation. After early disasters that allowed the virus to escape on air flights and forced the lockdown of Wuhan, China mobilized on an unprecedented scale and quickly extinguished all COVID-19 hotspots outside Wuhan.

Third, our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided to create its own diagnostic kit rather than use the one distributed by the WHO. The CDC’s production lines were contaminated with viruses, however, and the test kits were useless. The entire month of February, when it was still possible to prevent the exponential increase of infection through testing and contact tracing, was squandered.

This was the first disaster. The second was in March, when severe and critical cases began to crowd hospitals. As institutions began to run out of respirators, N-95 masks, and ventilators, they turned to their states and then to the federal government’s National Strategic Stockpile, which had been designed specifically for use during an outbreak like COVID-19.

But the cupboard was almost bare. It had been largely depleted during the national panic over swine flu in 2009 and several subsequent emergencies. The Trump administration had been repeatedly warned of its statutory duty to restock it, but had other priorities such as slashing the budget of the CDC and killing the Affordable Care Act.

As a result, millions of American workers have been going into battle in hospitals, nursing homes, public transit, and Amazon warehouses without essential protection that costs only pennies to manufacture. Nothing is as emblematic of the Trump administration’s total dereliction of duty than the fact that on the same day that the president was bragging of the United States’ “unmatched scientific and technological superiority,” the New York Times was devoting a page to “How to Sew a Mask at Home.”

Republished from Labor Notes.
ABOUT THE AUTHORMIKE DAVIS is the author of several books, including Planet of Slums and City of Quartz.

Workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, and Target Are on Strike and Need Your Solidarity

BY MINDY ISSER

In a historic strike, workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, and Target are striking today and asking customers to stage a one-day solidarity boycott. They’re fighting for what they deserve — and we should have their backs.
A worker leaves Whole Foods with Amazon Prime delivery packages on March 18, 2020 in Jericho, New York. Bruce Bennett / Getty

With the coronavirus pandemic turning from a health crisis into an economic crisis, workers in the United States are suffering more than they have in decades. Unemployment claims in recent weeks have hit 30 million — easily the highest on record. Lines at food banks are stretching on interminably. Businesses are shuttered — some, no doubt, indefinitely.

But some industries are doing just fine. Grocery stores, online retailers, and delivery services are booming. Since the pandemic reached the United States, Amazon announced it would hire nearly 200,000 new workers, and Instacart 550,000 new workers. And while these essential workers are lauded as “heroes,” the conditions at their workplaces show the profound lack of respect their employers actually have for them.

Today, workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, and Target are walking off the job. Their demands include compensation for all unpaid time off since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, hazard pay or paid sick leave, personal protective equipment (PPE) and cleaning supplies, and transparency on the number of cases in each workplace. The coalition of workers is also asking customers to boycott Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, and Target today.

Since the start of the crisis, multiple workplace actions have broken out at these big retailers — workers have gone on strike at Amazon distribution and fulfillment centers in Minnesota, Staten Island, and Detroit (among others); Whole Foods workers have staged a nationwide sick-out; and Target employees have spoken out publicly about their workplace conditions. But now, workers at these companies — along with employees at Instacart, FedEx, and Walmart — have united in a coalition with a shared set of demands. (Some Postmates, Trader Joe’s, and Shipt workers are also planning to join the strike today.)

So far, the businesses have reacted to workers’ actions with both carrots and sticks. In late March, Amazon announced temporary raises, and yesterday, after the coalition’s press release went out, Whole Foods said it would begin requesting that customers wear masks, even providing them for free. These are small gestures that don’t come close to meeting workers’ demands, but they show companies are watching workers’ actions — and responding to them. Then there are the sticks: last month, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, the organizer of the Staten Island walkout, and Trader Joe’s sent an anti-union memo after the Trader Joe’s Union Twitter account went live. Business Insider revealed the other week that Whole Foods is tracking all of its stores for unionization risks on a “heat map.”

The bosses of these companies, of course, are doing just fine. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and Whole Foods, is the richest man in the world. The other companies’ CEOs aren’t doing too badly, either: the CEO of Target, Brian Cornell, raked in $21.6 million last fiscal year, and the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, brought home $22.1 million. The pay at all of these companies hovers between $10 and $20 an hour. And while some provide health insurance, it’s often too expensive for workers to actually use — an obvious problem during a global pandemic.

Organizing inside of these companies has always been a heavy lift: locations are spread out across the country, and workers cycle in and out of employment (Amazon has a 104.4 percent turnover rate). Both of these realities make it hard to find and identify worker leaders (crucial to any good organizing drive), and for worker leaders to stay in their jobs long enough to effectively organize. For delivery workers, it’s especially difficult: they don’t have a set workplace, and they are misclassified as independent contractors, barred from unionizing.

But the labor movement has no choice but to try to reach these workers. As more businesses close, more unemployed workers will get funneled into the grocery, online retail, and delivery industries — and these sectors will form economic choke points that could be used to win major concessions for all workers.

Although it’s unclear how many workers will strike today, it’s crucial that they’re beginning to build ties with one another. The new coalition, along with Amazonians United and other nascent organizing committees, is a sign that things are shifting from one-off strikes and sick-outs to building organizations that can hopefully win long-term power for some of the most exploited workers in the country. No matter what happens today, it’s clear that workers’ consciousness is being raised — and that many are ready to struggle for what they deserve.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mindy Isser works in the labor movement and lives in Philadelphia.
Pandemics Can Mean Strike Waves
BYJOSHUA FREEMAN

In discussions about the last global pandemic, the “Spanish flu,” we never hear about the strike wave that kicked off at the exact same time. But in 1919, one-fifth of American workers walked off the job. We shouldn’t be surprised that labor militancy is spreading during today’s coronavirus pandemic.
Amazon workers hold a protest and walkout over conditions at the company's Staten Island distribution facility on March 30, 2020 in New York City. Spencer Platt / Getty
It is rarely noted that the greatest burst of labor militancy in the history of the United States, the 1919 strike wave, overlapped with the worst health crisis in the country’s history, the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. Four million workers struck in 1919, one-fifth of the workforce, a proportion never since equaled.

Strikes that year were startling not only for the sheer number of workers involved but also for the way they fundamentally challenged the status quo. In Seattle, a strike by shipyard workers expanded into a general strike that shut down the city for a week. In Boston, policemen went on strike. In New York, actors shut down Broadway theaters, while 50,000 men’s clothing workers stayed out of work for thirteen weeks.

In September, some 300,000 workers walked off their jobs in the first national steel strike, taking on the most powerful corporations in the country. In November, nearly 400,000 coal miners struck, defying a plea from President Woodrow Wilson and a federal court injunction.

The Russian Revolution and the growing strength of the British Labour Party infused a spirit of radicalism into even normally conservative sectors of the American union movement. In Seattle and San Francisco, longshoremen refused to load guns intended for use against the new Russian government. Railroad unions called for government ownership of all train lines. Coal miners debated the nationalization of their industry. The great strike wave began during a public health catastrophe.
The Flu and the Labor Uprising

Between August 1918 and March 1919, what was commonly called the Spanish Flu killed at least 30 million people. In the United States, between September 1918 and June 1919 an estimated 675,000 people died, the equivalent of 2.1 million deaths for a population the size of the current United States (very close to recent worst-case predictions for coronavirus fatalities in the absence of preventive measures). The epidemic crested in October 1918 but intensified again in December and January. After another tail-off, a new wave of flu in early 1920 caused still more fatalities.

Many 1919 strikes took place after the epidemic had subsided, but some took place during or immediately after it. In January 1919, during the third of four waves of influenza that were to hit New York City, 35,000 dressmakers — 90 percent female — walked off their jobs to demand a forty-four-hour work week and a 15 percent wage increase to meet the rising cost of living.


In Seattle, the flu hit hard, killing some 1,400 people, in spite of the shutdown of schools, theaters, dances, restaurants, bars, and most other public places and the quarantining of nearby military bases. The city epidemic was in its final phase when 65,000 workers ceased work on February 6, 1919. By the time the steel strike officially ended (in defeat) in January 1920, the epidemic had begun its rebound.

Oddly, connections are almost never drawn between the flu and the labor uprising. Standard accounts of the epidemic almost never mention labor, while standard accounts of labor and the strike wave have, at most, glancing references to the flu, like the use of the epidemic as an excuse to ban meetings by steelworkers.

A quick search of contemporary newspapers and journals suggests that, likewise, they did not often link the two, except metaphorically. The Literary Digest described 1919 as characterized by “an epidemic of strikes.” The Outlook, a New York City weekly, reported “The strike fever is in the air …. The disease that has struck our industrial systems breaks out in one place as it subsides in another.” It is as if the two great disruptions of an era happened in totally separate universes.

The disconnect in part reflects what from our current vantage seems an almost bizarre tendency to downplay or ignore the flu epidemic at the time and in the decades that followed. In November 1918, the New York Times, after two weeks during which 9,000 city residents died from the disease, wrote “Perhaps the most notable peculiarity of the influenza epidemic is the fact that it has been attended by no traces of panic or even excitement.” Historian Alfred W. Crosby noted that in spite of its enormous death toll, the pandemic “never inspired awe, not in 1918 and not since.”

Perhaps the drama of World War I, the subsequent peace process, and the greater familiarity then with death from contagious disease and combat conspired to dull reactions and blank social memory. Who knew that the daughter of Samuel Gompers, the most important labor leader in our history, died of the flu?

To a remarkable extent, life went on during the epidemic. Though there were fairly extensive efforts to reduce the spread of the disease through limiting public interaction, they were nowhere near what we are living through today. Seemingly, flu and labor militancy were separate spheres. There do not seem to have been strikes or other labor protests that directly concerned the flu, its impact on workers and how employers handled it (though since apparently no one has ever tried to study this, perhaps some did occur). Nor is there evidence that the epidemic weighed one way or the other on the success of workers during the great uprising.

But there were profound connections between the influenza epidemic and the strike wave, buried beneath the surface. War, globalization, and capitalist crisis connected the two.

Wartime labor shortages gave American workers unaccustomed power, as fear of job loss from collective action all but disappeared. At the same time, the government, to rally the nation for a battle that would benefit almost no ordinary folk, framed it as a “War for Democracy,” legitimating the notion of democratization as the labor movement sought to give its members some say in the autocratic world of work.

To prevent disruptions of wartime production, Washington forced employers to upgrade conditions and negotiate with workers. As a result, unions made massive gains in membership, power, and social presence during the war. The titanic clash between labor and business after the war stemmed from the effort by workers to protect and extend their wartime gains and by employers to roll them back. The radical thrust of labor action reflected a worldwide sense that the war had disastrously demonstrated the moral and political bankruptcy of ruling elites and opened the possibilities for new ways of organizing society.

The flu, too, was an artifact of war. No one knows exactly how and where it originated, but its rapid spread directly resulted from wartime military mobilization.

The epidemic first hit in the United States, at military bases in the Northeast in August 1918 (though there had been a largely unnoted increase in influenza the previous spring). The Army and Navy proved perfect delivery systems for spreading virus. New recruits were jammed together at training bases, many from rural areas where they rarely had been exposed to any viruses and who carried little immunity. Troops travelled across the country to deployments, often in overpacked trains, spreading the disease to each other and to the civilian population, among which the epidemic peaked two months after it was first identified in the military. Troop and transport ships carried the infection to Europe (including to the American delegation to the Paris peace talks) and ultimately around the world, in an era when the movement of people, goods, and capital across national borders justified the term globalization as much as such flows do today.

Both the flu and strike wave were manifestations of the breakdown of the existing order. Imperialist rivalries brought a carnage of war unprecedented in scale. The impact of the devastation, economically, politically, and socially, bred unrest and accelerated radical challenges, culminating in the Russian Revolution and the worldwide surge of labor and the Left it inspired. Amid the chaos and disruption, the influenza virus found a happy home.
Then and Now

Today, conditions are quite different from 1919. Yet there are overlaps between the coronavirus and Spanish flu pandemics and their links to labor. Our current pandemic is far more disruptive than the 1918–19 outbreak (though it remains to be seen if it will be as deadly). Unlike in 1919, the United States and most other countries have effectively shut down much of their economies to allow social isolation, guaranteeing a deep and perhaps long-lasting economic depression.

Comparatively, the labor movement is much weaker today than it was in 1919, coming off nearly a half-century of declining membership and power. And the relationship between collective worker protest and the flu is very different today than after World War I.

Unlike in 1919, right now we are seeing a flurry of worker protests that stem directly from the epidemic, including petitions, letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations, and even strikes. As many employers treat their workers’ health and their very lives with contempt, failing to provide employees with needed protective equipment, insisting that they work in close quarters, not sending workers with flu-like symptoms home, not disinfecting contaminated spaces, banning the wearing of masks, failing to provide adequate sick or family leave, and not offering any or decent extra compensation for life-threatening work, more and more workers have been speaking up and taking action. Strikes have hit a number of companies, including Amazon, Whole Foods, Perdue Farms, and Instacart, along with bus systems in several cities. Coronavirus-related issues have sped up union organizing campaigns at a number of companies, including Trader Joe’s. Some workers have demanded that their employers use idled workers and resources to fight the epidemic, like the GE aviation division workers who want their factories used to make ventilators.


So far, worker protests have been small in size and short in duration. But things could change. When President Trump touted plans to begin reopening businesses at Easter, though it was obvious that the pandemic would still be raging, talk bubbled up about a general strike. Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants (and a possible successor to AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka), said that such a general strike was not impossible if there was a widespread sense that “if you don’t take action right now, you’re gonna die.”

World War I gave workers an unusual edge because of the severe labor shortage created by the demands of war production and the cutoff of immigration. The coronavirus is giving workers an edge because they hold the moral high ground. Health workers, grocery workers, postal workers, transit workers, home aides, police and corrections officers, truck drivers, pharmacy workers, sanitation workers, farm workers, and the like, going to work, day after day, under dangerous conditions, have kept the country going. Meanwhile, the moral degeneracy of so many of our business leaders and wealthy elites becomes more and more obvious.

When their lobbyists scurry to get special favors in the bailout bills and they instantly fire employees and end their health insurance (if they ever had it), without making any sacrifices of their own, all from the safety of their comfortable homes or second homes, the deadly consequences of inequities of wealth and power are there for all to see. When Whole Foods, controlled by the richest man in the world, suggested that its workers contribute paid time off to coworkers sick with COVID-19, rather than itself looking after the health and well-being of its workers, the deep rot of the society can’t be missed.

The incompetence of so much of government, especially at the federal level, may also spark more worker action. Washington and many state and local governments spectacularly failed at their most basic responsibility: to protect the health and safety of the people. The cults of privatization, government downsizing, and lean production and distribution have proved disastrous, along with the contempt for expertise, science, and even simple facts. Already, across the country, ordinary people have been stepping into the breach, producing masks and gowns, helping neighbors, unretiring to the front lines.

Perhaps, like World War I, the coronavirus, in unmasking the failures of the old order, may result in a new wave of activism. If this is the best we can do, the time has come to try something radically different. Who knows — we may yet see not just disease, but labor militancy as well, sweep the country, as happened once before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua Freeman is a professor of history at Queens College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author most recently of Behemoth: The History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World.

The Russian Flu of 1889: The Deadly Pandemic Few Americans Took Seriously

Modern transportation helped make it the first global outbreak.

7 Continents History/Everett Collection

GREG DAUGHERTY MAR 23, 2020 HISTORY.COM

From America’s vantage in 1889, the Russian influenza posed little cause for concern. So what if it had struck with a vengeance in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg that fall, infecting as much as half the population? Or that it had raged swiftly westward across Europe, into the British Isles? Or that some of the continent’s most prominent leaders—the czar of Russia, the king of Belgium, the emperor of Germany—had fallen ill with the virus?

To Americans, it was safely over there, a vast ocean away.

But within a few months, the pandemic spread to virtually every part of the earth. Tracing its path, scientists would observe that it tended to follow the major roads, rivers and, most notably, railway lines—many of which hadn’t existed during last major pandemic in the 1840s.

That finding gave credence to the theory that the disease was spread by human contact, not by the wind or other means—and that as long as people could move with ease from city to city and country to country, stopping its spread would be all but impossible. Today, the Russian influenza is often cited as the first modern flu pandemic.

READ MORE: Pandemics That Changed History: A Timeline 


A Russian map, dated 1890, detailing the occurrence of influenza by province across Russia.Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division

Coming to America

Most Americans first learned of the pandemic in early December of 1889. The nation’s newspapers covered its growing toll in Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Paris, Prague, Vienna and other cities. When top European leaders fell ill, Americans were updated on their condition on a near-daily basis.

Even so, the news seemed to cause no particular stir in the U.S. and certainly nothing resembling a panic. But just as railroad transportation had allowed the influenza to cross Europe in a matter of weeks, the larger, faster steamships of the day increased the odds that infected travelers would soon be arriving from across the Atlantic.

Indeed, New York and other East Coast port cities became the earliest U.S. locales to report suspected cases, and seven members of one Manhattan family, ranging in age from 14 to 50, were among the first confirmed patients. Their household’s outbreak had begun with sudden chills and headaches, reports said, followed by sore throat, laryngitis and bronchitis. Overall, “the patients were about as sick as persons with a bad cold,” according to one newspaper account.

Initially, public health officials played down the dangers, arguing that the Russian influenza represented a particularly mild strain. Some officials denied that it had arrived at all and insisted that patients merely had the common cold or a more typical, seasonal flu.

The newspapers, too, treated the influenza as nothing to get worked up about. “It is not deadly, not even necessarily dangerous,” The Evening World in New York announced, “but it will afford a grand opportunity for the dealers to work off their surplus of bandanas.”

READ MORE: Why the Second Wave of the Spanish Flu Was So Deadly

Did you know? While U.S. presidents have had many things named after them—schools, highways, airports—John Tyler, the 10th president, who served from 1841 to 1845, got an epidemic. At the time, influenza was often referred to by its French name, 'La Grippe.' When an outbreak hit during Tyler’s term, his political opponents started calling it the 'Tyler grippe.' And, unfortunately for him, the name stuck. But Tyler wasn't the first U.S. president to give his name, however unwillingly, to the flu. President Andrew Jackson’s opposition seized on an 1829 outbreak, branding it 'Jackson’s itch.'

A first death—then many more

On December 28, newspapers reported the first death in the U.S., 25-year-old Thomas Smith of Canton, Massachusetts. He was said to have “ventured out too soon after his illness, caught a fresh cold and died of pneumonia.” Soon after, a prominent Boston banker also succumbed.

As the death toll rose, Americans began to take the threat more seriously. For the first week of January 1890, New York reported a wintertime death record of 1,202 people. While only 19 of those cases were attributed to influenza alone, the numbers revealed a startling spike in deaths from related diseases.

“Persons with weak lungs and those suffering from heart disease or kidney troubles are most seriously affected, and in many cases the influenza leads quickly to pneumonia,” the New-York Tribune reported.

READ MORE: How the 1957 Flu Pandemic Was Stopped Early in Its Path


An 1892 map detailing the cases of the flu pandemic across the globe in 16 different time periods, from May 1889 to October 1890.
National Library of Medicine

The disease spreads west

Meanwhile, the disease spread inland, helped, as in Europe, by America’s vast network of railroads. Reports came in from Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Kansas City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other U.S. cities.

One Los Angeles victim gave a particular vivid description of the experience. “I felt as if I had been beaten with clubs for about an hour and then plunged into a bath of ice,” he told a reporter. “My teeth chattered like castanets, and I consider myself lucky now to have gotten off with a whole tongue.”

People coped as best they could. “On a Sixth Avenue Elevated train this morning fully one-half of the passengers were coughing, sneezing, and applying handkerchiefs to noses and eyes, and many of them had their heads bundled up in scarves and mufflers,” The Evening World reported. “They were a dejected and forlorn appearing crowd.”

Druggists throughout the country noted an unusually high demand for quinine, which some health authorities had suggested as a possible remedy—though medical journals warned against the dangers of self-medicating and urged people to simply let the disease run its course.

READ MORE: How Five of History's Worst Pandemics Finally Ended


An end, for the moment


By early February 1890, according to contemporary accounts, the influenza had largely disappeared in the U.S. Difficult as the pandemic had been, the country had gotten off lucky compared with much of Europe. New York City recorded the highest number of deaths, with 2,503, although Boston, with a smaller population, was harder hit on a per-capita basis. The total U.S. death toll was just under 13,000, according to the U.S. Census Office, out of about 1 million worldwide.

The Russian influenza wasn’t entirely finished, however. It returned several times in subsequent years. Fortunately, a large portion of the U.S. population was immune by then, having been exposed to it during its first visit.

Today, the Russian influenza is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the far more devastating Spanish influenza of 1918. But it did give Americans a preview of life—and death—in an increasingly interconnected world.

Social Distancing Made May Day Protests Look A Lot Different This Year

"The traditional means of protesting, gathering friends together, is unsafe at this time, so our protest looks like a car caravan."

Amber JamiesonBuzzFeed News Reporter Posted on May 1, 2020

Armando Franca / AP

Workers unions keep a safe distance from each other and wear face masks to help protect against the spread of the coronavirus in Lisbon, May 1.
Essential workers led hundreds of May Day protests on Friday, including nurses calling for better protective gear in hospitals and Amazon workers holding walkouts to demand closures of warehouses where staffers are infected with COVID-19.

But how do you protest during a global pandemic, when social distancing is crucial and a lack of protective gear is a key demand of workers?

May 1 is historically the biggest protest day for the labor movement, with large rallies held across the globe. With over 30 million US workers filing for unemployment since the pandemic began, and essential workers risking their lives for company profits, advocates say this year's protests felt even more vital.

However, protests looked different this year. On social media, thousands of people shared posts calling for a one-day boycott of Walmart, Instacart, Amazon, Whole Foods, Target, and Shipt.


#PettyPendergrass@ashoncrawley
boycott walmart, amazon, fedex, whole foods, target, shipt and instacart tomorrow, may 1, 2020. stand with the workers that deserve better pay and safe working conditions.02:33 AM - 01 May 2020


Fewer protests are in person on the street, and those that are involve attendees standing 6 feet away from each other. Others are using car caravan protests, which have become popular since the pandemic began, including groups ranging from those calling for government lockdowns to end and supporters of California's farmworkers.

"Some of these social distancing protests are quite dramatic and quite powerful," said Ray Brescia, professor of law at Albany Law School and author of The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions. He likened the creativity of the May Day protests to the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Angela Gatdula, a nurse working in a COVID-19 ward at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, spoke to BuzzFeed News over the honks from the car caravan, which she organized with other unionized nurses from National Nurses United and the California Nursing Association.

Frederic J. Brown / Getty Images

Nurses employed at Providence Saint John's Health Center and their supporters participate in a car caravan in Santa Monica, California, April 21.

"The traditional means of protesting, gathering friends together, is unsafe at this time, so our protest looks like a car caravan," said Gatdula, who got sick with COVID-19 while treating patients.


They had gathered at a nearby parking lot and planned to drive in laps around the hospital, honking their horns and displaying messages painted on their windshields and on posters being held out of windows.

"We can't get PPE," Gatdula said, referring to personal protective equipment.


California Nurses Association / National Nurses United
Angela Gatdula

She noted that her hospital makes them reuse N95 masks. A group of nurses from her hospital were suspended — and later reinstated — after refusing to treat patients without the masks.

They want the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to order a temporary emergency order to protect and give optimal PPE to health care workers, and for the president to fully enact the Defense Production Act to increase the production of PPE.

"I'm doing everything I can, and hopefully that pushes our hospital administrators, legislators, and the president to do the right thing and get us the protection we need to keep ourselves safe and the community safe," Gatdula said.

For weeks, nurses across the country have been participating in shift change protests calling for better PPE, wherein at the end of one shift nurses walk outside hospitals and speak to the media about their need for N95 masks as the new group takes over caring for patients.

Brescia pointed out the effectiveness of health care workers who have posted videos of themselves on social media showing bruises from wearing masks all day and crying at the horrors of what they've seen as a form of protest.

"I’m fully confident some of these images and messages from inside the hospital wards have gotten people to stay at home," he said. "People are using creative ways to connect and capture the reality of the ground for so many and getting it out to people who are going to be affected by it and can advocate for change."

Make the Road New York — which advocates for immigrants and working-class communities — organized a car caravan through the streets of Midtown Manhattan, starting at Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office, moving to Times Square, where they protested with body bags, and ending at the luxury NoMad apartments of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, where a mariachi band played.

"This situation is going to call for artists and creative types to embrace the restrictions and find ways to communicate the need for change in new ways," Brescia said.

In 2019, the organization's May Day protest had been a march through the downtown financial district. But organizers realized that this year their normal plans would not work, and they tried to figure out "what we could pull off," said Jose Lopez, deputy director of Make the Road New York.


Make the Road New York
A protester with Make the Road New York holds a May Day demonstration in Times Square.

The group is calling for a $3.5 billion state bailout for excluded workers, including those who are undocumented, a cancellation of rent and mortgage payments, and the release of people from immigration detention centers and prisons.

"We all kind of got on a phone call and hashed out some ideas and spitballed some plans that we thought we would be creative and cool," Lopez said.

Car protests don't usually take place in New York City, an area with low car ownership. Lopez said they sent out requests to staff and members to see who had access to vehicles to ensure they would have at least 50 available.

They then encouraged people to make signs and decorate their vehicles. They provided guidance on how to maintain social distancing for moments when people got out at the stops to play music and hold posters; they also included guidelines to make sure cars stayed in a single file line in order not to block roads and delay any EMS workers.


Make the Road New Yor
A protester in the Make the Road New York car caravan, May 1.

Protesters were asked not to bring anyone with them who does not already live in their home — "something we would never do for a street-based action," Lopez said. "It was the opposite of what I would normally do, which would be [to] say, 'bring your whole building with you!'"

They also organized a Facebook Live panel, run by two moderators at home, to ensure members who did not have access to a car or were at high risk of getting ill could participate.

Former Amazon worker Christian Smalls, who was fired in recent weeks after organizing a walkout over working conditions at the company's Staten Island warehouse, led a small socially distanced protest with other essential workers in New York City.


Christian Smalls@Shut_downAmazon
2nd Stop @NYGovCuomo Office 💪🏽07:55 PM - 01 May 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite

May Day protests look different in 2020, particularly since most essential workers are avoiding the tactics of armed demonstrators in Michigan's capitol this week, but they can be an effective tool for calling for workers' rights, Brescia said.

"If people were able to protest the federal government’s response to COVID, you would see ... [rallies] multiple times the size of the Women's March in every city, if people were able to demonstrate," he added. "You can still demonstrate, and you have to use the protections, and I think it’s very powerful when people do that."
PUTIN'S VERSION OF YOU'RE FIRED
Three Russian Doctors Treating The Coronavirus Have Fallen Out Of Windows In Just Over A Week

Dr. Alexander Shulepov is in serious condition after falling from a building. Two other doctors treating coronavirus patients have died in similar circumstances.


Christopher Miller BuzzFeed News Contributor Posted on May 4, 2020

Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

Alexander Shulepov, a doctor at an ambulance unit in Russia’s western Voronezh region, complained in an April 22 post on social media about shortages of medical supplies and being forced to work despite testing positive for COVID-19.

Ten days later, he fell from a hospital window under mysterious circumstances, local media reported, making him the third Russian doctor treating coronavirus patients to suffer a similar fate in just the past 10 days.

Shulepov, 37, survived the fall from a second-floor window, but he suffered a fractured skull and is now in serious condition. The two other doctors are reported to have died.

The falls are being viewed suspiciously by many in Russia, which has a history of targeting and eliminating critics, including several who have mysteriously fallen to their deaths in recent years.

Shulepov’s colleague, ambulance paramedic Alexander Kosyakin, and representatives of the regional coronavirus task force, confirmed over the weekend that Shulepov fell out of a window, according to news outlets Meduza and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The incident happened at the Novousmansky district hospital where Shulepov worked and was being treated for COVID-19 in the town of Novaya Usman.

Shulepov had reportedly been hospitalized on April 22 after testing positive for COVID-19 but was set to be released soon after his latest test came back negative.

On the day he was admitted, Shulepov and Kosyakin published a video in which they complained about their boss forcing Shulepov and his colleagues to continue working together even after his positive test result.

“The chief doctor is forcing us to work. What do we do in this situation?” Shulepov said in the video.
But Shulepov retracted his statement three days later, amid suspicions that he was threatened to do so, saying in another video that he was in “an emotional state” when he made his initial claim.

Shulepov is the third physician in Russia to fall out of a window under mysterious circumstances during the coronavirus outbreak.

On Friday, Yelena Nepomnyashchaya, the acting chief physician at a hospital for war veterans in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, died from injuries sustained as a result of falling from her fifth-floor office window on April 25.

A local Krasnoyarsk television station reported on April 25 that Nepomnyashchaya, 47, had just finished talking on a conference call with the regional health minister about turning one of her hospital buildings into a ward to treat coronavirus patients when she fell. Nepomnyashchaya was reported to be strongly against the idea. Reports also said she had complained to superiors about the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for her and her staff. Her obituary said she was a 20-year veteran of the regional health care system.

A day earlier, on April 24, Natalya Lebedeva, the 48-year-old chief of the ambulance center in Zvyozdny near Moscow, died “as a result of an accident,” according to a Moscow hospital statement. She had been hospitalized with COVID-19.

News outlets Moskovsky Komsomolets and REN TV, citing Lebedeva’s colleagues, said she had fallen from a high window and that she may have killed herself after accusations from her superiors that she had infected several of her colleagues with the coronavirus. Police have not confirmed the reports.

The Voronezh region where Shulepov is located had reported 636 coronavirus cases as of Monday, less than 1% of Russia’s 145,268 confirmed cases, the Moscow Times reported. The news site said at least 41 doctors and patients at the region’s largest hospital have been infected with COVID-19. At least 1,280 people across the country have died from the disease.

After Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed in mid-April that the coronavirus situation was fully under control, an outbreak forced him and regional authorities to impose strict social distancing measures.

Some observers have said Russian authorities may be underreporting the number of coronavirus cases and deaths from COVID-19 because of a low rate of testing.

 Christopher Miller is a Kyiv-based American journalist and editor.