History Won’t Help Us Now
We have no historical precedent for this moment.
As a medical historian, I have never been busier. Over the past 20 months, journalists and policy makers have reached out in an effort to understand what past infectious diseases might teach us about this one. These exchanges almost always end with questions about how this pandemic is similar to the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, which, until COVID-19, was the worst pandemic in human history.
The truth is we have no historical precedent for the moment we’re in now. We need to stop thinking back to 1918 as a guide for how to act in the present and to start thinking forward from 2021 as a guide is the pandemic I will be studying and teaching to the next generation of doctors and public-health students.
