We’re All Purposefully Forgetting the Pandemic

People want to talk about ANYTHING else.

Around, oh, June 2020, I found myself getting obsessed with the 1918 Flu Pandemic. This was partly because I was sitting around my house with nothing to do and nowhere to go, like most of the rest of you. But mostly: I just wanted to know when this was going to be over. So I looked to history.

I found some basic facts about the 1918 Flu Pandemic. Five hundred million people were infected with it, a third of the world’s population. Fifty million people died, including 650,000 in the United States. It affected younger people more than older people, reversing what we saw in this pandemic. But what I marveled at most was how, by 1920, people were over it.

Across the board, by 1920, the United States had moved on from the pandemic. If anything, it was more focused on recovering from World War I, which ended right around the time the pandemic was beginning. The 1918 Flu had three major waves, the last of which subsided in summer 1919. And then that was it.

It is difficult to find coverage of the pandemic after early 1920. Newspapers stopped writing about it…