BYU researchers associate poor response efforts for the 1918 pandemic with higher death rates. Why it matters now

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a Utah-US History Review Series for the History section of KSL.com.

PROVO – A new data set released by BYU researchers this week and a soon-to-be-released coincident research paper provide a better understanding of the impact of public health interventions during the 1918 influenza pandemic, including death rates almost doubled in cities with poor mitigation efforts.

While this is a review of something that happened over a century ago, it could offer some insight into measures regarding the management of the COVID-19 pandemic today – account given the many parallels between the 1918-19 pandemic and the coronavirus epidemic.

BYU researchers worked with the non-profit genealogical organization FamilySearch on “Families of the 1918 Pandemic.” The website currently allows users to view lists of people who died from the 1918 pandemic in nearly a dozen states, including Utah. It lists 2,408 flu-related deaths in Beehive State just as of 1918 alone.

The database also provides the names and genealogical history of those who died from the pandemic over a century ago.

The exact figures are not known, but the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 is believed to have resulted in the deaths of more than 50 million people worldwide. Many epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists return to this for how to handle a pandemic without a viable treatment or vaccine, which was the case for most of 2020. This is still the case until herd immunity be reached, which would be several more months at best.

“That’s what we loved about the website we created. It links you directly to each person’s FamilySearch profile, because we want you to see them as real people, and we want you to see them if you have one. personal connection with them. ” said Dr Joseph Price, professor of economics at the university and co-author of the dataset and research paper on the issue.

But one of the issues that hindered understanding of the pandemic is that the data was not easily kept at the time. Today, the Utah Department of Health is providing all kinds of daily information that shows where new cases of COVID-19 are and different viral trends; while much of the data documented a century ago comes from fragments 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 start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They received, along with researchers at the University of Michigan, a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project that began with Ohio.

When the biggest global pandemic since the 1918 flu epidemic 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. “There is a lot of talk with us should we 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 student in the project, the group began sifting through the cause of death data from the 1918 death certificates available on FamilySearch. By breaking down the data by detailed locations, they were able to cross-reference the records with the exact location and dates of death along with the dates when mitigation efforts were put in place based on the log records of the time.

Price, BYU student Carver Coleman, and a University of Notre Dame researcher also used death certificate data in a handful of cities in Ohio and Massachusetts, as well as times known to the efforts of public health intervention to compare mortality rates in the cities studied. . Their early research concluded that death rates during the fall 1918 epidemic – the worst wave of the pandemic – were almost twice as high in cities that did not implement any interventions compared to those who did.

The document is expected to be released soon, after being delayed by issues with the way some death certificates were completed in Massachusetts, Price said.

Prior to the study, there were mostly anecdotal examples from 1918 that showed what could happen with a poor response to a pandemic. The most notable flub of this era was the Philadelphia Liberty Loan show. 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 drew about 200,000 participants; the city was left with hospitals overrun within days, and around 4,500 flu deaths were reported in the city about two weeks after the parade.

There were also documented success stories. 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 these known stories. For example, the 2,408 flu deaths in Utah come from data collected from all 29 counties in the state. Each county had at least three flu deaths in 1918, Salt Lake County – which at the time numbered 160,000 people – with the highest number of deaths: 928. The disease has claimed nearly 0.6 % of county population that year.

Salt Lake County had a mix of loose and strong restrictions in 1918. The county’s biggest restrictions in 1918 came during the holiday season after an increase in flu cases and deaths were reported following the celebrations until. ‘at the end of World War I. Comparing the history of Salt Lake County to that of Milwaukee, censuses indicate that the population of Milwaukee at the time was somewhere in the range 2.5 times that of Salt Lake County, but the data from BYU and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel indicate Salt Lake County had almost twice as many. influenza deaths.

The BYU project is not finished. The group of a dozen researchers now say their goal is to create the very first dataset that includes every person who has died in the pandemic across the world, which will include millions of records. Thanks to an automated system they created, they are able to transcribe more than 100,000 death certificates in less than two hours.

When completed, it may simply provide the most comprehensive examination of the impact of public health measures on deaths during the 1918 pandemic. It would help us better understand the connection between the two, not only as the fight against COVID-19 continues – and where the exact links between deaths and mitigation efforts can be finalized until it is complete – but possibly for future pandemics.

“I think what’s going to happen is when the pandemic (COVID-19) ends, we’re going to want to know what the long-term consequences have been? And that’s where historical data can be really helpful. “said Price. “We’re not going to know the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for a long time, so the ability to look to the past to better know what we can learn – and I think there is a lot of discussion if you can. compare pandemics.

“But I think we can still learn a lot from the 1918 pandemic.”

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