Editor’s Note: This article is part of a Utah and US history series for the Historical section of KSL.com.
PROVO – A new dataset published this week by BYU researchers and a coinciding, soon-to-be-published research paper provide a better understanding of the impact of interventions on public health during the 1918 flu pandemic, including that death rates nearly doubled in cities where were poor mitigation efforts.
While it is an overview of something that happened more than a century ago, it could provide insight into measures related to tackling today’s COVID-19 pandemic – given the many parallels between the 1918-19 pandemic and the outbreak of the coronavirus.
BYU researchers collaborated with the nonprofit genealogy organization FamilySearch on “Families of the 1918 Pandemic.” The website currently allows users to view the list of people who were killed in the 1918 pandemic from nearly a dozen states, including Utah. As of 1918 alone, there are 2,408 flu-related deaths in the Beehive State.
The database also includes the names and genealogical histories of those who died of the pandemic more than a century ago.
The exact figures are unknown, but the 1918-1919 flu pandemic is said to have resulted in the deaths of more than 50 million people worldwide. Many epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists look back to it for answers on how to tackle a pandemic without a viable treatment or vaccine, which was the case for most of 2020. It will still be the case until herd immunity has been achieved, which is believed to be several. more months away, at best.
“That’s what we loved about the website we set up. You will be linked 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 relationship with them, ”said Dr. Joseph Price, a university professor of economics and co-author of the dataset and a research article on the issue.
But one problem that plagued understanding of the pandemic is that data was not easily kept back then. Today, the Utah Department of Health provides all kinds of daily information showing where new COVID-19 cases are and different virus trends; while much of the documented data from a century ago comes from excerpts found in newspapers or correspondents of the time.
Price and Stanley Fujimoto, a computer science graduate student at BYU, began work on a similar project before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Together with the researchers at the University of Michigan, they received a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project that originally started in Ohio.
When the greatest global pandemic since that flu outbreak in 1918 hit the US last year, the work of the BYU researchers took on a different meaning and used what they knew to focus more on a different angle.
“I think what motivated us was to better understand which interventions help during a pandemic,” said Price. “There are many discussions with should we close schools? Should we close churches? Should we close other public facilities? Cities had to make the same decisions in 1918.”
With the help of another student on the project, the group began to search through 1918 causes of death records on FamilySearch available death certificates. By splitting the data into detailed locations, they were able to compare exact location records and dates of death with dates of mitigation measures based on newspaper records of the time.
Price, BYU student Carver Coleman, and a researcher at the University of Notre Dame, also used death certificate data in a handful of cities in Ohio and Massachusetts, as well as known timings of public health efforts to track death rates in the cities studied. comparable . Their early research concluded that death rates during the fall 1918 outbreak – the worst wave of the pandemic – were nearly twice as high in cities that did not implement interventions compared to cities that did.
The article is expected to be published soon, after it was delayed due to issues with how some death certificates were filed in Massachusetts, Price said.
Prior to the study, there were some mainly anecdotal examples from 1918 that showed what could happen if there was a bad response to a pandemic. The most notable flub of the 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 approximately 200,000 visitors; the city ended with hospitals overrun within days, and about 4,500 flu deaths were reported in the city in a period of about two weeks after the parade.
Stories of success were also documented. Parades and other public gatherings were banned in Milwaukee, and the total number of deaths from the pandemic was less than 500, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The BYU dataset goes beyond just these well-known stories. For example, the 2,408 flu deaths in Utah come from data collected in all 29 counties in the state. Each county had at least three flu deaths in 1918, with Salt Lake County – home to about 160,000 people – with the most deaths: 928. The disease made up nearly 0.6% of the county’s population that year.
Salt Lake County experienced a mix of loose and strong restrictions in 1918. The county’s biggest restrictions in 1918 came during the holiday season following an increase in flu cases, and deaths were reported after celebrations up to the end of World War I. Comparing the Salt Lake County story to that of Milwaukee, census records indicate that Milwaukee’s population at the time was somewhere in the range of 2.5 times that of Salt Lake County, but data from BYU and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel indicate that Salt Lake County had nearly twice the population. flu deaths.
The BYU project is not over yet. The group of about a dozen researchers now say their goal is to create the very first data set that includes every individual who died in the pandemic around the world, including going through millions of records. Thanks to an automated system they created, they can transcribe more than 100,000 death certificates in less than two hours.
Once completed, it will provide perhaps the most comprehensive overview of how public health measures impacted deaths during the 1918 pandemic. That would help us better understand the link between the two, not only as the fight against COVID-19 continues – and where exact links between deaths and mitigation efforts can be finalized until it is over – but possibly for future pandemics.
“I think what’s going to happen is that when the (COVID-19) pandemic ends, 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 to the past to better understand what we can learn – and I think there is a lot of debate about comparing pandemics.
“But I think we can learn a lot from the 1918 pandemic.”
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