Editor’s note: This article is part of a series reviewing the history of Utah and the United States for the historical section of KSL.com.
PROVO – A new set of data released by BYU researchers this week and a research paper to be published soon provides a better understanding of the impact of public health interventions during the 1918 flu pandemic. including that death rates have almost doubled in cities where there have been weak mitigation efforts.
Although it is a review of something that happened over a century ago, it could provide information on measures to manage the COVID-19 pandemic today – given the many parallels between the 1918-19 pandemic and the coronavirus outbreak.
BYU researchers worked with the nonprofit genealogy organization FamilySearch on “Families of the 1918 Pandemic.” The website allows users to view the list of people who have died in the 1918 pandemic in nearly a dozen states, including Utah. It lists 2,408 flu-related deaths in Beehive state since 1918 alone.
The database also provides the names and genealogical history of those who died of the pandemic more than a century ago.
Exact numbers are unknown, but the 1918-19 flu pandemic is believed to have killed more than 50 million people worldwide. Many epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists look back at it for answers on how to treat a pandemic without viable treatment or vaccine, which was the case for most of 2020. It is still the case. until the immunity of the herd is reached, which is believed to be higher several months later, at best.
“We liked that on the website we created. It connects you directly to the FamilySearch profile for each person, because we want you to see them as real people and we want to see if you have a personal connection to them.” said Dr. Joseph Price, a professor of economics at the university and co-author of the dataset and research paper on the subject.
But one problem that has affected the understanding of the pandemic is that the data were not easily stored at the time. Today, the Utah Department of Health provides daily information on new cases of COVID-19 and various virus trends; whereas much of the data documented a century ago comes from excerpts found in newspapers or correspondents since then.
Price and Stanley Fujimoto, a computer science student 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 initially began with Ohio.
When the biggest 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 a different angle.
“I think what motivated us was to better understand what interventions help during a pandemic,” Price said. “There is a lot of talk about 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 in the project, the group began to go through the death cause data from the 1918 death certificates available on FamilySearch. By breaking down the data by detailed location, they were able to cross-reference the exact location and date of death, with dates on which mitigation efforts were implemented based on newspaper records at the time.
Price, BYU student Carver Coleman, and a researcher at the University of Notre Dame also used data from death certificates in a handful of Ohio and Massachusetts cities, as well as known schedules of public health intervention efforts for to compare death rates in the cities studied. . Their first research concluded that death rates during the outbreak of the fall of 1918 – the worst pandemic wave – were almost twice as high in cities that did not implement any intervention compared to those that did.
The paper is expected to be published soon, after it was postponed due to problems with how some death certificates were completed in Massachusetts, Price said.
Prior to the study, there were some largely anecdotal examples from 1918 that showed what could happen due to a poor pandemic response. The most notable club of the 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. The Smithsonian magazine reported that the parade attracted about 200,000 participants; the city arrived with outdated hospitals in a few days and about 4,500 deaths from the flu were reported in the city within about two weeks of the parade.
Success stories have also been documented. Parades and other public gatherings were banned in Milwaukee, and the total number of deaths due to the pandemic was less than 500, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The BYU dataset only surpasses these known stories. For example, the 2,408 deaths from the Utah flu come from data collected from all 29 counties in the state. Each county had at least three flu deaths in 1918, Salt Lake County – home to about 160,000 people at the time – with the most deaths: 928. The disease claimed nearly 0.6% of the county’s population that year. .
Salt Lake County had a mix of weak and strong restrictions during 1918. The county’s biggest restrictions in 1918 came during the holiday season, after an increase in flu cases and deaths were reported after the holidays until the end. World War I. the comparison between the story of Salt Lake County and that of Milwaukee, census records indicate that the population of Milwaukee at that time was somewhere between 2.5 times larger than that of Salt Lake County, but data from BYU and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Salt Lake County had nearly twice as many flu deaths.
The BYU project is not over. The group of about a dozen researchers now say their goal is to create the first data set to include every individual who died in the global pandemic, which will include millions of records. Thanks to an automated system they have created, they are able to transcribe over 100,000 death records in less than two hours.
Once completed, it can only provide the most comprehensive analysis of how public health measures affected deaths during the 1918 pandemic. This would help us better understand the connection between the two, not just as we fight COVID. -19 continues – and where the exact links between deaths and mitigation efforts can be completed until it ends – but possible 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 there, historical data can be really useful,” Price said. “We will not know for a long time the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the ability to look to the past to know better 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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