Editor’s note: This article is part of a series that discusses the history of Utah and American history for the historical section of KSL.com.
PROVO – A new dataset published by BYU researchers this week and a compiled research article to be published soon provide a better understanding of the impact that public health interventions had during the 1918 flu pandemic, including that near-death rates doubled in cities where there were weak mitigation efforts.
Although it is an overview of something that took place more than a century ago, it can provide insights into measures to deal with today’s COVID-19 pandemic – given the many parallels between the 1918-19 pandemic and the coronavirus outbreak.
Researchers at BYU worked with the non-profit genealogical organization FamilySearch on ‘Families of the 1918 Pandemic’. The site currently allows users to view the list of people who died in the 1918 pandemic from nearly a dozen states, including Utah. It contains 2,408 influenza-related deaths in the Beehive State since 1918 alone.
The database also contains the names and gender history of those who died of the pandemic more than a century ago.
Exact numbers are not known, but the 1918-19 flu pandemic is thought to have killed more than 50 million people worldwide. Many epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists look back at answers on how to deal with a pandemic without a viable treatment or vaccine, which was the case for most of 2020. This is still the case until herd immunity is reached, which is believed to be several at best several months away.
“This is what we loved about the site 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 with them, “says Dr Joseph Price, a professor of economics at the university and co-author of the dataset and a research article on the matter.
But a problem that has plagued the understanding of the pandemic is that data was not easily preserved at the time. The Utah Department of Health today provides all kinds of daily information showing where new COVID-19 cases are and various viral trends; while much of the documented data from a century ago comes from fragments found in newspapers or correspondents at the time.
Price and Stanley Fujimoto, a graduate student in computer science at BYU, began work on a similar project before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Together with researchers from the University of Michigan, they received an award from the National Institutes of Health for a project that originally began in Ohio.
When the biggest global pandemic since the outbreak of 1918 in 1918 hit the US last year, the work of the BYU researchers took on a different meaning and they used what they knew more to give a different focus.
“I think what motivated us was to better understand what interventions help during a pandemic,” Price said. “There are a lot of discussions with schools that we have to close? Do we have to close churches? Do we have to 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 sifting through cause-of-death 1918 death certificates available on FamilySearch. By breaking up the data according to detailed locations, they were able to cross-reference records with the exact location and death dates with the dates on which mitigation efforts were instituted based on newspaper records from 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 well-known timelines of public health intervention attempts to measure mortality rates in the cities studied. to compare. . Their early investigation concluded that the death toll during the outbreak of the fall of 1918 – the worst wave of the pandemic – was almost twice as high in cities that did not intervene compared to those that did.
The paper is expected to be published soon, after being delayed by problems over how some death certificates were filled out in Massachusetts, Price said.
Prior to the study, there were mostly anecdotal examples from 1918 that showed what could happen due to poor pandemic response. The most striking from this time 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 participants; the city ended up with excessive hospitals within days, and about 4,500 flu deaths were reported in the city within a period of about two weeks after the parade.
Stories of success have also been 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 just these familiar stories. The 2,408 deaths in Utah flu, for example, come from data collected from all 29 provinces in the state. Each county had at least three flu deaths in 1918, with Salt Lake County – then about 160,000 people – having the most deaths: 928. The disease claimed about 0.6% of the population that year.
Salt Lake County had a mixture of loose and strong restrictions during 1918. The province’s biggest restrictions in 1918 occurred during the holiday season after an increase in cases of flu and death was reported after celebrations at the end of the First World War. To kind of make a comparison between the story of Salt Lake County and that of Milwaukee, the census shows that the population of Milwaukee at that time was 2.5 times larger than that of Salt Lake County, but data from BYU and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel indicates that Salt Lake County had nearly twice as much. flu deaths.
The BYU project is not over. The group of about a dozen researchers now say it is their goal to create the everyday dataset ever that includes every individual who died in the pandemic around the world, which includes millions of records. Thanks to an automated system they created, they can record more than 100,000 death records in less than two hours.
Once completed, it provides perhaps only the most comprehensive overview of how social health measures affected the deaths during the 1918 pandemic. This will help us better understand the connection between the two, not only when the fight against COVID-19 continues – and where precise 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 when the (COVID-19) pandemic ends, we’ll want to know what the long – term consequences were? And that’s where the historical data could be very useful,” Price said. “We are not going to know the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for a long time, so the ability to look at the past to know better what we can learn – and I think there are a lot of discussions if you can compare pandemics.
“But I think there is still a lot we can learn from the 1918 pandemic.”
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