A historian I met through my Twitter feed (you gotta love Twitter!) recently wrote an article about how our hometown of Iloilo dealt with the 1918 flu pandemic. The article, written by Berniemack “Habagat” Arellano, and which can be found HERE, tells the story through historical records typed up in the mid-1950s, and which prefaced reports of the pandemic with a poignant Hiligaynon quote. After having recounted the people’s jubilation at the fall of the Kaiser – and the resultant end of the First World War – the record poignantly says “Wala sing langit nga wala sing tupad na duta.” There is no sky without land – the sky, in this case, being the good news that the war was over; the land, the sobering reality that an epidemic of the flu had gripped the city.
Habagat’s article is a must-read (click HERE for that) for the historical context it provides — and the spoiler: it might take us two years to return to normalcy.
For me though, I am doubly thankful to the article because it pointed me in the direction of historical documents that I’m going to spend the next week poring over. And, again as pointed out by Habagat, I’m going to start here:
In a separate archive within the same site linked to by Habagat, and to which he adverted in his article, there was this account of how the coming of Americans was slowly changing the way the natives (us, obviously) saw epidemics. In so doing, this teacher in 1954 – Vicente Bello – gave us a hint on how we should be grappling with COVID19 in 2020.
Prior to the Americans, Bello wrote, epidemic outbreaks recurred yearly and were accepted by the populace as divine punishment. Not surprising since, as Bello reported, “sanitary measures were unknown to the people.”
The Americans brought with them modern methods of fighting epidemics, including quarantines which were enforced strictly even though the general public didn’t comprehend the reason for them.
But here is where I truly felt that Bello was speaking about us, in the here and now.
“The fight against the spread of disease was a sure but slow struggle against ignorance and superstition.”
Bello, 1954
Isn’t it just? I mean, first we were all hoping that COVID19 would magically disappear with warmer weather; and then we were told that we didn’t need face masks. Even now, there are people (who you would have thought would know better) who insist that COVID19 can be prevented if not cured by the consumption of megadoses of vitamin C, the inhalation of steam, and drinking an infusion of ginger, lemon, and god knows what other weed. Apparently, things haven’t changed all that much despite our access to the internet and literally more information than was ever available to humanity throughout the entirety of history.
But Bello had good news too:
One of the agencies that helped much in the fight against communicable diseases was the school system. Physiology, hygiene, and sanitation were made one of the important subjects in school.
Bello, 1954
Education, ya geniuses. That’s how you fight back against epidemics and outbreaks. Teach everyone, even the kids, how they each have a very crucial role to play in defeating the outbreak, even if all that is really demanded of them is to simply wash their hands and cover their mouths. They knew that already more than a century ago and yet we still, to this day, insist that staying cloistered in our homes is the only solution.
Don’t get me wrong. Quarantines work. But quarantines can’t last forever, and you can’t just throw entire cities back into lockdown everytime the cases spike.
The way out of this is teach everyone how they can be part of the solution. And when I say teach, I don’t mean to just put out a couple of posters with clever slogans and a ton more posters extolling what you’ve done. Make the posters informative and as non-partisan as possible so that the message isn’t lost.
And don’t just teach people to do what you tell them to do; teach them why they need to do it. Relentlessly attack the superstitious nonsense, no matter how popular the wrong notion is or how famous or politically well-connected its proponents happen to be. Don’t be listening to someone say, for example, “eat cactuses!” and go, “hmmm, that’s an unusual suggestion.” No, it isn’t an “unusual” suggestion! Call it what it is: batshit crazy!
