One thing is certain about the COVID-19 pandemic from a historical perspective, it will be well-documented.
The outbreak of the virus that has so far killed 1.85 million people and crippled the world economy has remained the overriding topic of discussion on established news platforms and social media ever since the outbreak began in late February.
Thousands of news stories are produced daily about the unprecedented worldwide race to develop vaccines, the struggle of healthcare systems to avoid being overwhelmed by the disease and the efforts of governments to provide economic relief programs for citizens whose jobs have been lost or reduced as a result of quarantines and lost business revenue. Much more will be written about the longterm health effects of the virus still being discovered and the extent to which mental health, social/business interactions and lifestyles have been permanently altered by COVID.
There’s no shortage of information available in 2021 about how Prince George has fared through the coronavirus pandemic and how the city has tried to cope with the worst outbreak of disease since the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, which was not well-documented. When Spanish flu was at its worst in the fall of 1918 there was no internet, no local radio or TV stations, and only one newspaper – The Citizen - around to report the news through printed pages of its twice-weekly editions. As UNBC biomedical anthropologist Lianne Tripp has learned in her studies about pandemics, she often comes up empty in her searches for detailed written history about how our country dealt with Spanish flu.
“The data isn’t that great that we have in Canada,” Tripp said. “So many people are interested in what happened to First Nations people but unfortunately we don’t really have great records.”
Tripp, an associate professor at UNBC who taught a pandemics course in the spring term, is co-author of an interactive electronic book on epidemics which focuses on Spanish flu, COVID-19, and Canada’s history of quarantines and lazarettos (hospitals for people with infectious diseases).
Tripp charted death records from Corless Funeral home and determined there were 64 local deaths in the Prince George area between June 1918 and June 1919 attributed to influenza, pneumonia and bronchial pneumonia. Twenty-nine of those deaths happened in October 1918. Her studies of people living in relative isolation in Malta and Gibraltar show similar spikes that same month but the peak death rate was not the same all over the world.
“In quite a few places in the Southern Hemisphere it didn’t hit until 1919,” said Tripp, an assistant professor at UNBC. “In much of Canada when COVID started creeping up in September and October it was uncanny, very similar (to COVID-19). It’s a different disease, of course, and we know going indoors takes a toll.
“In most cases it was a secondary pneumonia infection that killed people and I think that’s similar to coronavirus too. What was unusual in 1918 was it was people in their prime, the reproductive age or young adults that were getting the severe illness and dying at faster rates and we’ve never seen anything like that since then. ”
Tripp suggests one of the theories of why 20-40-year-olds were more at risk of developing severe symptoms of Spanish flu all over the world was that stronger immune systems, when they overreact, cause more severe illness. The symptoms were similar to pneumonia – body aches, fever, chills, cough, shortness of breath, chest pain. Spanish flu did not produce the gastrointestinal/cardiovascular disorders or loss of the sense of taste/smell symptoms associated with COVID-19.
In 10 months, nearly 16,000 Canadians have died from COVID-19. Spanish flu was a threat for two years, from the spring of 1918 to the spring of 1920, and it killed 55,000 people in Canada. More than 75 per cent of COVID deaths in Canada were residents of care homes and assisted living retirement facilities. During Spanish flu those facilities did not exist in most parts of the country and seniors tended to live in their own homes or under the care of their families where it was easier to avoid crowding and remain isolated from the virus.
