Editor’s note: This article is part of a series that analyzes the history of Utah and the United States for the Historical section of KSL.com.
PROVO – A new data set published by BYU researchers this week and a coincidental research article to be published soon gives a better understanding of the impact of public health interventions during the 1918 influenza pandemic, including that death rates almost doubled in cities where there were poor mitigation efforts.
While it is a review of something that happened more than a century ago, it can offer insights into measures relating to the treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic today – considering the many parallels between the 1918-19 pandemic and the coronavirus outbreak.
BYU researchers worked with the nonprofit 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 in almost a dozen states, including Utah. It lists 2,408 influenza-related deaths across the state of Colmeia in 1918 alone.
The database also provides the names and genealogical history of people who died in the pandemic more than a century ago.
The exact figures are not known, but the 1918-19 influenza pandemic is believed to have killed more than 50 million people worldwide. Many epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists look back for answers on how to deal with a pandemic without a viable treatment or vaccine, which has been the case for most of 2020. It is still the case until herd immunity is achieved, which is believed to be several more months away, at best.
“This is what we love about 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 you to see if you have a personal connection with them,” said Dr. Joseph Price, professor of economics at the university and co-author of the dataset and a research article on the subject.
But an issue that has hampered the understanding of the pandemic is that data was not stored promptly at that time. Today, the Utah Department of Health provides all kinds of daily information that shows where new COVID-19 cases and different virus trends are; while much of the documented data from a century ago comes from fragments found in newspapers or correspondents of the time.
Price and Stanley Fujimoto, a graduate student in computer science at BYU, started working on a similar project before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They, along with researchers at the University of Michigan, received a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project that originally started in Ohio.
When the biggest global pandemic since the 1918 flu outbreak hit the United States last year, BYU researchers’ work took on a different meaning and they used what they knew to focus more from another angle.
“I think what motivated us was to better understand what interventions help during a pandemic,” said Price. “Are there many discussions about whether we should close schools? Should we close churches? Should we close other public facilities? Cities had to make those same decisions in 1918.”
With the help of another student on the project, the group began combing the cause of death data from the 1918 death certificates available on FamilySearch. By dividing the data by detailed locations, they were able to cross records with exact location and dates of death with dates when 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 some cities in Ohio and Massachusetts, as well as known schedules for public health intervention efforts to compare city death rates. studied. His early research concluded that death rates during the outbreak in the fall of 1918 – the worst wave of the pandemic – were almost twice as high in cities that did not implement any intervention compared to those that did.
The article is expected to be published soon, after it has been postponed for questions about how some death certificates were filled out in Massachusetts, Price said.
Before the study, there were a few mostly anecdotal examples from 1918 that showed what could happen with a weak response to the pandemic. The most notable failure of that 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 drew nearly 200,000 participants; the city ended up with crowded hospitals in a few days, and about 4,500 flu deaths were reported in the city in a period of 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 are from data collected from all 29 counties in the state. Each county had at least three influenza deaths in 1918, with Salt Lake County – home to about 160,000 people at the time – with the highest number of deaths: 928. The disease affected about 0.6% of the county’s population that year. .
Salt Lake County had a mix of flexible and strong restrictions during 1918. The biggest restrictions in the county in 1918 came during the holiday season, after an increase in flu cases and deaths reported after the celebrations of the end of the First World War. To offer some sort of comparison between the history of Salt Lake County and Milwaukee, census records indicate that the population of Milwaukee at the time was about 2.5 times larger than that of Salt Lake County, but data from the BYU and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel indicate that Salt Lake County had almost twice as many deaths from influenza.
The BYU project is not over yet. The group of about a dozen researchers now claims that their goal is to create the first set of data that includes each individual who died in the pandemic worldwide, which will include going through millions of records. Thanks to an automated system that they created, they are able to transcribe more than 100,000 death records in less than two hours.
Once completed, it can only provide the most comprehensive review of how public health measures impacted deaths during the 1918 pandemic. This would help us better understand the connection between the two, not just as the fight against COVID-19 continues – and where the exact links between deaths and mitigation efforts can be finalized until it is over – but possibly for future pandemics.
“I think what will happen is when the pandemic (COVID-19) is over, are we going to want to know what the long-term consequences were? And that’s where historical data can be really useful,” said Price. “We will not know the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for a long time, so the ability to look to the past to learn more about what we can learn – and I think there are a lot of discussions if you can compare pandemics.
“But I think we can still learn a lot from the 1918 pandemic.”
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