The idea that America's going to escape this is just a fantasy. “In the case of America, it’s well known that Trump has slashed the budget for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “Pandemics are always political because they bring up questions about whether administrations have invested sufficiently in health resources,” says Dr Honigsbaum, pointing to Donald Trump's insistence yesterday that the risk to the United States remains “very low” thanks to the “very good” early precautions taken by his own administration – comments that contradicted his own government health expert. This could also inform the logic to keep schools open: multiple studies have shown that school closures have a knock-on, detrimental effect on the economy by forcing parents to take time off work.

He believes British ministers are worried that the “real danger of the pandemic is panic”, and that the mass closure of offices could prompt an economic shock more disruptive in its impact than coronavirus itself. “That same week, 2,100 New Yorkers died of influenza,” writes Arnold.Īlthough we now live in a “different geopolitical situation” and the world is no longer at war, Dr Honigsbaum says, economic concerns could still be playing their part in shaping how governments respond to public health crises like coronavirus. This created a perfect environment for mass infection, she argues, a mistake repeated in the United States when President Wilson led a parade of 25,000 New Yorkers down the ‘Avenue of the Allies’ in October 1918. She writes that the British government essentially told its subjects that it was their patriotic duty to “carry on” as normal and make sure the cogs of the economy continued to whir. It is a theme that Catharine Arnold picks up in Pandemic 1918, her grisly account of Spanish flu. “It was the closing months of the war, a lot of people were dying, a few flu deaths here and there didn’t make much difference,” says Dr Honigsbaum. Worldwide, between 50 million and 100 million died – more than the number killed by the bombs and bullets of the First World War. In startlingly honest language, Sir Arthur told the conference: “The relentless needs of warfare justify the risks of spreading infection and the associated creation of a more virulent type of disease.”Īccording to Dr Honigsbaum, the “carry on” advice may well have been responsible for thousands of the 250,000 Britons who ultimately died in the Spanish flu pandemic. Instead, Sir Arthur told the Royal Society of Medicine that Britain’s “major duty” was to “carry on” largely as normal, “even when risk to health and life is involved”. Men and women needed to return to the factories day after day if Germany was to be defeated, officials believed, and so the memorandum was buried.

It is traced back to comments made in 1918 by Sir Arthur Newsholme, Britain’s then senior medical officer, in response to the outbreak of Spanish flu, a deadly strain of the H1N1 virus first spotted in late 1917.īy late 1918, ministers were aware of the horrific potential impact of the virus, which was known to turn its victims’ bodies blue and black before death, and so drafted a memorandum which advised Britons to isolate themselves at home if they were sick, and avoid any public gatherings.īut the nation was also facing its final stretch of the First World War, which had already claimed hundreds of thousands of British lives, and Sir Arthur worried that telling workers to stay at home could hinder Britain's war effort. But according to Dr Mark Honigsbaum, medical historian and author of The Pandemic Century, the language of 'carry on' originates not from World War Two but World War One.

Keep calm and carry on ww2