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  • 2020-12-09 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Old Apartment Radiators Designed To Prevent Spread of the 1918 Pandemic? (en)
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  • Just over a century ago, another virus-born pandemic was ravaging the world: The 1918 flu pandemic (sometimes called the Spanish flu), which killed millions globally in 1918 and 1919. And as the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 rages on, many are discovering that vestiges of the 1918 pandemic are suddenly relevant again. One such vestige is the bete noire of many New Yorkers — oversized, noisy radiators that overheat apartments. The radiators were built to keep dwellings warm with open windows on the coldest days. Although public health experts in the early 20th century didn't have the technology available in 2020 to detect and analyze viruses, they intuited that opening windows was safer during a pandemic than having people sitting indoors, breathing stale air. The Bloomberg story linked in the above tweet states: Holohan told The New York Times in 2016 that the 1918 flu pandemic inspired something called the Fresh Air Movement, the push to keep windows open to circulate as much fresh air as possible, as a stopgap measure to prevent the spread of airborne diseases: The 1918 flu pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It killed 50 million people worldwide, while it's estimated that 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. Roughly 675,000 Americans died during the pandemic. Like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the disease was airborne, but the CDC notes that while modern laboratories have synthesized it for study, the properties that made it so deadly at the time are not well understood. Unlike the current pandemic, the 1918 flu pandemic virus killed primarily young people. As we noted above, the 1918 flu pandemic was called the Spanish flu, but that was a misleading term. The origin of the virus is unknown. But the nickname Spanish flu took hold because as it spread during World War I, countries involved in the war attempted to suppress news reporting on the issue, to avoid lowering national morale and causing panic during the Great War, according to USA Today. Spain was neutral in the war, and the news media there was openly reporting on it, especially when Spanish King Alfonso XIII fell gravely ill with the virus. Because the Spanish news media reported robustly on the disease while other nations minimized it, it took on the moniker Spanish flu. The COVID-19 pandemic, as of this writing, has killed more than 287,000 Americans and 1.5 million people worldwide, sickening millions. Holohan made a brief video on the topic, which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bA5bwyW2BY&feature=emb_title (en)
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