"but did not prevail" The Voluntary Mental Retardation of the Republican Money Grubbers Is Going To Get Potentially Thousands If Not Millions Killed.

Deaths per 1,000 soldiers each week during 1918–1919 in the U.S. Army

Source: Ayres LP. The war with Germany: a statistical summary. Washington: Government Printing Office; 1919. p. 127.

Looking into how criminally stupid the Republican-fascists, libertarians, FOX based fascist cultists, etc. of 2020 are being, I have been looking at the last similar pandemic to see what happened and parallels that made things worse.   This paper has this passage that shows even in 1918, before they had discovered the existence of viruses and how they operate, they know this.

Medical officers such as Chesney wanted clean barracks and also worried about crowding. Surgeon General Gorgas had recommended that Army housing provide 60 square feet per man, but did not often prevail. As Gorgas told one training camp commander, “We know perfectly well that we can control pneumonia absolutely if we could avoid crowding the men, but it is not practicable in military life to avoid this crowding.”14 The Medical Department even asserted that “there is to be expected a definite relation between the degree of crowding and the amount of respiratory infection.”2 (p. 111) But if it was difficult to control crowding in the training camps, it was impossible in the battlefields. 

Yet the Republican-fascists, etc. are urging an end to social-distancing here, a century and two years after that huge mistake was made.  Only in our case, there is nothing comparable to the war-time conditions that gave them an excuse.  

As they conducted their analyses, military medical officers soon understood that the wave of influenza that had run through many U.S. training camps during the spring of 1918 constituted a first wave of the pandemic. Fourteen of the largest training camps had reported influenza outbreaks in March, April, or May, and some of the infected troops carried the virus with them aboard ships to France.12 In the late spring and summer, influenza visited all of the armies of Europe, including the AEF, but because influenza was common in the military, and few patients became critically ill, medical officers were not alarmed. But by the late summer some saw the emergence of a new, lethal influenza.

Captain Alan M. Chesney, medical officer with an AEF hospital at Valdahon, an artillery training camp behind the front lines in France, documented the evolution of a more virulent influenza from his vantage point. A physician who was later dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Chesney noted that three different infantry brigades of 4,000 men occupied the post in succession, “thus every three or four weeks there occurred a marked change in the population of the post.” He theorized that “the history of the epidemic, therefore, resolved itself into distinct periods corresponding to the various brigades which entered the post,” and “the frequent changes in the population of the post, brought about by the short stay of each brigade, exercised considerable influence upon the course of the epidemic of influenza.”

During Chesney's first documented period, the month of June to July 27, the 5th Artillery Brigade had 77 “relatively mild” cases of influenza. During the second phase, July 27 to August 23, 200 men of the 58th Artillery Brigade became ill, about 6.5%. None of them died, but the outbreak was serious enough that the next brigade cleaned out the barracks, even washing the walls, before they moved in. Despite this precaution, during Chesney's third phase, August 23 to November 8, more than one-third of the 6th Artillery Brigade, 1,636 soldiers, contracted influenza and 151 died. Chesney concluded that “…these successive outbreaks tended to be progressively more severe both in character and extent, which would speak for an increasing virulence of the causative agent.”13

Medical officers such as Chesney wanted clean barracks and also worried about crowding. Surgeon General Gorgas had recommended that Army housing provide 60 square feet per man, but did not often prevail. As Gorgas told one training camp commander, “We know perfectly well that we can control pneumonia absolutely if we could avoid crowding the men, but it is not practicable in military life to avoid this crowding.”14 The Medical Department even asserted that “there is to be expected a definite relation between the degree of crowding and the amount of respiratory infection.”2 (p. 111) But if it was difficult to control crowding in the training camps, it was impossible in the battlefields. Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald has argued that trench warfare and its crowded conditions enabled an especially aggressive and deadly influenza virus to gain footing in humans.15 As soldiers in the trenches became sick, the military evacuated them from the front lines and replaced them with healthy men. This process continuously brought the virus into contact with new hosts—young, healthy soldiers in which it could adapt, reproduce, and become extremely virulent without danger of burning out. From there, according to a Navy report, “It is reasonable to suppose that late in August influenza of severe type was spread from French, Spanish, and Portuguese seaports to the Orient, South Africa, the United States, and South America.”5 (p. 2427) As Chesney and Ewald suggest, the influenza of 1918 was a product of trench warfare, and the influenza that attacked the 6th Artillery at Valdahon would travel the highways of war, circling the globe.

I don't know if the quote I saw online is true, that people grew tired of being quarantined in 1918 and that the celebrations at the end of the war spiked the deadlier wave among the general population, I don't know enough to know if that's the case.  What was clearly true is that the recommendations for social distancing as a means of preventing infections was made and not taken and the results were a far worse pandemic than might have been.   

I do know that if the brief period of far from complete social distancing is being promoted as being "too much" or "too long" or a "violation of civil liberties (libertarians match their emotional development of the "terrible twos" with an intellectual development of a stupid 12-year-old) then there is no prospect that they will give up eating the animals which have been the vectors of one after another pandemic virus.  If people aren't wised up by these experiences, we are doomed to this cycle of idiocy and irresponsibility continuing.