Editor’s note: This article is part of a series reviewing the history of Utah and the United States in the History section of KSL.com.
PROVO – A new dataset published by BYU researchers this week and a matching research article soon to be published give a better understanding of the impact public health interventions had during the 1918 flu pandemic, including that mortality rates almost doubled in cities where there were poor mitigation efforts.
While this is a review of something that happened more than a century ago, it could provide information on measures related to the manipulation of the current COVID-19 pandemic, given the many parallels between the 1918-19 pandemic and the coronavirus outbreak.
BYU researchers worked with the nonprofit family organization FamilySearch on “Families of the 1918 Pandemic.” Currently, the website allows users to see the list of people who died as a result of the 1918 pandemic in about a dozen states, including Utah. It lists 2,408 flu-related deaths across the hive state, since 1918 alone.
The database also provides the names and genealogical history of those who died from the pandemic more than a century ago.
Exact numbers are not known, but the 1918-19 flu pandemic is believed to have killed more than 50 million people worldwide. Many epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists are once again looking for answers on how to manage a pandemic without viable treatment or vaccine, which happened for most of 2020. This is still the case until the herd’s immunity is reached. which is believed to be several to more months, at best.
“That’s what we loved about the website we set up. It links you directly to the FamilySearch profile for each person because we want you to see them as real people and we want you to see if you have a personal connection to it.” said Dr. Joseph Price, a professor of economics at the university and co-author of the data set and a research paper on the subject.
But one issue that has affected the understanding of the pandemic is that the data was not easily preserved at the time. Today, the Utah Department of Health provides all sorts of daily information showing where new COVID-19 cases and different virus trends are; whereas, a large part of the documented data from a century ago come from fragments found in newspapers or correspondents of the time.
Price and Stanley Fujimoto, a graduate student in computer science at BYU, began working on a similar project before the COVID-19 pandemic began. They, along with researchers at the University of Michigan, received a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project that originally began with Ohio.
When the largest global pandemic since that 1918 flu outbreak hit the United States last year, the work of BYU researchers took on a different meaning and they used what they knew to focus more on another. angle.
“I think what motivated us was to better understand what interventions help during a pandemic,” Price said. “Are there many discussions about whether we should close schools? Should we close churches? Should we close other public facilities? Cities had to make these same decisions in 1918.”
With the help of another project student, the group began examining the cause of death data from the 1918 death certificates available on FamilySearch. By disaggregating the data by detailed locations, they were able to cross-reference records with the exact location and dates of death with the dates on which mitigation efforts based on the newspaper’s records were launched. age.
Price, BYU student Carver Coleman, and a University of Notre Dame researcher also used death certificate data in a handful of Ohio and Massachusetts cities, as well as known times of health intervention efforts to compare mortality rates in the cities studied. . Early research concluded that mortality rates during the outbreak of the fall of 1918, the worst wave of the pandemic, were nearly twice as high in cities that did not implement any intervention compared to those that did.
The document is expected to be released soon, after problems related to how to fill out some death certificates in Massachusetts were delayed, Price said.
Prior to the study, there were some mostly anecdotal examples from 1918 that showed what could happen to a poor pandemic response. The most notable flub of that era was the Philadelphia Liberty Loan parade. City officials ignored calls from health officials to cancel the parade and the event was quickly linked to thousands of infections. Smithsonian magazine noted that the parade attracted about 200,000 attendees; the city ended up with hospitals invaded in a few days, and about 4,500 flu deaths were reported in the city in a two-week period after the parade.
Success stories were also documented. Parades and other public gatherings were banned in Milwaukee, and the total death toll from the pandemic was less than 500, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The BYU dataset goes beyond these known stories. For example, the 2,408 flu deaths in Utah come from data collected from the 29 counties in the state. All counties suffered at least three flu deaths in 1918, with Salt Lake County, where about 160,000 people lived at the time, with more deaths: 928. The disease reported about 0.6% of the county’s population. that year.
Salt Lake County had a mix of strong and strong restrictions during 1918. The county’s biggest restrictions in 1918 occurred during the holiday season after an increase in flu cases and deaths occurred after the celebrations at the end of the First World War. Comparing the history of Salt Lake County with that of Milwaukee, census records indicate that the population of Milwaukee at that time was approximately 2.5 times larger than that of Salt Lake County, but data from BYU and the The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel indicates that Salt Lake County had nearly twice as many flu deaths.
The BYU project is not over. The group of a dozen researchers says their goal now is to create the first data set that includes all the people who died in the pandemic around the world, which will include going through millions of records. Thanks to an automated system they created, they can transcribe more than 100,000 death records in less than two hours.
Once completed, it can only provide the most complete review of how public health measures affected deaths during the 1918 pandemic. This would help us better understand the connection between the two, not just at the time the fight continues. against COVID-19, and where the exact links between deaths and mitigation efforts can be finalized until it ends, but possibly for future pandemics.
“I think what will happen is when the pandemic ends (COVID-19), will we want to know what the long-term consequences were? And that’s where the historical data can be really useful,” Price said. “We won’t know the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for a long time, so the ability to look back to know better what we can learn – and I think there’s a lot of discussion about whether pandemics can be compared.
“But I think we can still learn a lot from the 1918 pandemic.”
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