COVID-19: We’ve been here before-by Mark Fourre, President of Coastal Healthcare Alliance-Belfast-Waldo

Many of the communities have witnessed the selfless promises they have made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, so I remember how to deal with past pandemics.

This is not the first pandemic to touch midcoast main. Influenza in Spain from 1918 to 1920 resulted in 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide, including 5,000 deaths in Maine. How Belfast responded to the Spanish flu provides an interesting window to look into today’s COVID-19 experience.

Between September 1918 and May 1919, 47,000 cases of Spanish flu were reported in Maine, killing 5,000. During this time, Belfast had 35 deaths due to influenza and related complications. The rising death toll was enough to urge city leaders to take positive action. From the report of Dr. Orris S. Vickery, Secretary of the Health Board of the Belfast City Annual Report 1918-1919:

“Since the influenza pandemic during the fall season was so severe in other parts of the state, after the meeting with the mayor, we convened a meeting of many of the city’s businessmen and the board had full responsibility. The question of closing schools, churches, and public places of entertainment indefinitely because I didn’t want to.

“At this meeting, it was unanimous that such procedures were appropriate under the current circumstances and that the sites were closed for about three weeks.”

What I am interested in about this passage is how many locals embrace the difficulties of everyday life, sacrifice for greater benefit, and endeavor to endure the difficulties. Is it?

Of course, not everybody from 1918 to 1919 embarked on what the science and medical community deems necessary, as it does today.

“It was very, again and again very difficult to get people to understand that complying with health laws was an obligation to the community as an individual … I needed to enforce much of the board. See the case for quarantine regulations. “

This passage is specifically related to the outbreak of scarlet fever in 1918, but it is reasonable to imagine that it has expanded to include flu-related quarantine regulations in Spain.

I first encountered a pandemic in the 1980s when I completed medical training at the Emergency Medical Resident Program (Fresno) at the University of California, San Francisco.

The mysterious illness that became known as AIDS emerged, killing all infected. Moreover, it was like a virus that was transmitted from person to person through blood exchange, such as the wrong needle or fluid exchange. I, like other residents and medical students, experienced needlestick injuries while working with patients.

Many of the patients we treated were transient. In short, we were unable to track and monitor patients and could not reliably assess the risk of our own needle stick injury. Instead, if this happened to me more than once, a blood sample was taken shortly after to establish a baseline. Then, in the next week, a series of blood samples will be taken to check for any changes.

During this time you were presumed to be contagious and affected your relationship with your family.

Of course, we had to fight our own knowledge that a positive outcome would be a death sentence. It’s no exaggeration to say that we were all scared.

But we and other medical communities have adapted. With one exception, wearing gloves has become the norm. Researchers have continued to seek treatments and vaccines, developing treatments that extend the lifespan of people infected with HIV. And the world has adapted, largely thanks to the educational efforts of governments, academic research centers and non-profit organizations.

Still, despite all these efforts, HIV / AIDS continues today. In 2018, 40 years after the pandemic began, more than 1.7 million people were infected with HIV and more than 700,000 died of AIDS-related illnesses.

Overall, more than 74.9 million people have been infected with HIV and more than 32 million have died of AIDS-related illnesses since the beginning of the pandemic.

I will address this in order to see the current pandemic.

On the one hand, the Spanish flu lasted less than two years, affecting one-third of the world’s population and killing an estimated 100 million people. Meanwhile, a 40-year-old pandemic of HIV / AIDS has taken place, and despite the fact that it has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives every year, it has received little attention.

During each of these outbreaks, as COVID-19 threatens to do now, the daily tracking of unemployment, social isolation, and fatalities has made life unbearable for many. But the people before us adapted to their situation and eventually overcame it. They have adopted new social norms and invested in medical research long before the obsolete elbow ridge.

COVID-19 can be different from Spanish influenza and HIV / AIDS. But those who endured the early pandemics can show us the way forward and give us hope. For future details.