Viruses don't recognise nationality

LESS than two months ago, on April 28, the number of Americans who were recognised to have died from Covid-19 infection surpassed the 58,220 US soldiers who were killed in the Vietnam War. Almost exactly twice that number of American servicemen (116,516) died in World War I, and the US Covid-19 loss of life has now exceeded that figure.

This will probably be noted in the US as another indication of the toll on American lives that the novel coronavirus outbreak has taken, but the World War I reference calls for further comment. Over 45,000 of the Americans who perished while serving in the armed forces at that time died from influenza; 30,000 of those died before they left the US.

In the final year of World War I, the influenza pandemic spread around the world. On the battlefields of Western Europe, barbed wires and machine guns kept opposing armies at a distance from each other, but influenza nevertheless spread on both sides of the front line.

None of the political or military leaderships of the belligerent states wanted the damage being wrought by the pandemic to be publicised. It was asking a lot of their populations to send young men to fight and possibly die on battlefields far from home, but it was thought that the idea that they might be killed by another enemy that respected no national loyalties would harm morale. The powers of censorship then available were used to downplay or suppress news of the devastating impact of the influenza epidemic.

However, in 1918, there were still a few neutral states that did not have such rigorous news censorship - such as Spain, which had a diverse and lively press. Its newspapers reported freely and fully on how influenza was incapacitating and killing Spanish people. This did not escape notice in the outside world, and it resulted in the pandemic being dubbed the "Spanish flu".

In fact, the disease did not originate in Spain. It seems certain that it originated in the US. An influenza outbreak of unusual severity was reported from Haskell County, Kansas early in 1918, and the disease appears to have been carried out of relative isolation there by young men embarking on military service.

It spread through military training camps in the US, but such was the pressure to build up American forces in France that the ill were embarked on troop ships along with the healthy, and in April 1918, influenza arrived in the French port of Brest. After that, it quickly spread throughout the Western front war zone and to the world beyond.

This experience, in retrospect, highlights the value of isolating the ill from the healthy during a severe infectious disease outbreak, as well as the provision of reliable information to both medical personnel and the public from the earliest detection of the danger.

It might also serve as a warning against pinning a nationality on infectious diseases that do not discriminate between peoples. US President Donald Trump has tried to make political capital out of branding Covid-19 a "Chinese disease". Now would be a good time to recall that if it had not been for the wartime censorship that obscured the point of origin of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, it might have passed into history known not as "Spanish flu", but as "American flu".