What the History of the COVID-19 Pandemic Teaches us—And What Not

Abstract

Crises turn history into a weapon. In wars and catastrophes, history becomes an argument. It promises not only a classification of the present but also simple answers to complicated questions. The use of history was also evident in times of COVID-19. Since February 2020, newspapers and magazines have been abundant with historical analogies: the “Spanish flu” dominated the headlines in particular. But the history of the plague, smallpox, cholera and polio was also suddenly high up on the agenda. The history of epidemics seemed to provide examples that could be used to classify or even solve current problems (Franchini et al. 2020; Agrawai et al. 2021).

Experts warned against such analogies between the past and the present early on (Borck 2020; Simonetti et al. 2021). History does not repeat itself, even if it sometimes rhymes, to borrow a bon mot from Mark Twain. The popularity of epidemic history actually became a danger during the COVID pandemic. Horror scenarios such as comparisons to the Spanish flu’s death toll of up to 50 or 100 million people did little to objectify the debate. Repeated references to the eradication of smallpox through global vaccination programmes were also only of limited help in classifying the battle against the pandemic. COVID mutated much faster than any of its predecessors.

History can nevertheless contribute to crisis management—also, and especially, in times of pandemics. We may learn little from historical analogies and parallels. But we do learn much more from a historical classification of our present that traces the roots of current problems. For a historical classification of COVID, we therefore do not have to go back that far in time. The plague outbreaks of the early modern era, the fight against cholera in the 18th and 19th centuries or the Spanish flu of 1918 are not as useful for analysing the current pandemic. Rather, a look at more recent developments of the 20th and 21st centuries proves to be sufficiently illustrative.