"They thought they had controlled it, that they had stopped it." ~ The hubris of the Nanny State in controlling pandemics

"They were mistaken. The masks were useless."

All throughout the viral craziness of the past year, we have incessantly heard references made to the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919. The implication of many of these comments is usually something to the effect of: “Even during the Spanish Flu, they knew that the places that enforced mask mandates on the healthy did much better than those places where such mandates were not in place.” 

Would it surprise you to learn that this bit of now conventional wisdom is most likely not true? 

One city where a mask requirement was enforced most stringently during the Spanish Flu was San Francisco. There, the Head of Public Health, Dr. William Hassler, instituted one of the strictest mandates in the country and many of his modern-day emulators point to his efforts with approval, saying with authority that this method is how they successfully fought the Spanish Flu in San Francisco.

The truth is not quite so simple, as this excerpt from Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from The Plague of Athens to AIDS, by Samuel Kline Cohn (Oxford University Press, 2018) demonstrates:

Hassler had the good fortune that moments of imposing the mask roughly matched the falls in influenza cases. Yet other places, where no mask ordinances had been imposed, showed the same trends, such as San Mateo in the Bay area. The head of California’s State Board of Health presented statistics from San Francisco’s best run hospital: trained nurses had consistently worn masks but 78 percent of them caught the disease. Out-of-state papers entered the fray, highlighting cities such as Chicago, where there were no mask ordinances but the consequences were, “no worse.” [Cohn: Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from The Plague of Athens to AIDS, page 440]

In a similar work for a more general-reader audience, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (Viking, 2005), John M. Barry gives a similar post-mortem to San Francisco’s efforts during the Spanish Flu: 

On November 21, every siren in the city signaled that the masks could come off. San Francisco had—to that point—survived with far fewer deaths than had been feared, and citizens believed that the masks deserved the credit. But if anything had helped, it would have been the organization Hassler had set in place in advance….They thought they had controlled it, that they had stopped it. They were mistaken. The masks were useless. The vaccine was useless. The city had simply been lucky. Two weeks later, the third wave struck. Although at its peak it killed only half as many as did the second wave, it made the final death rates for the city the worst on the West Coast.” [The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, page 375]

Both these books were written in the age when saying things like "the masks were useless" was an allowable opinion, though based on the photo at the top of this post, it's pretty clear that fear was driving people to ridiculous extremes in 1919 as well.

Now, let’s compare the conclusions reached by Cohn and Barry with some examples from our own pandemic which, based on statistics easily available on Google, look like this at present: 

• California = 1,343 COVID deaths per million population
• Florida = 1,456 COVID deaths per million population
• Texas = 1,539 COVID deaths per million population
• Michigan = 1,656 COVID deaths per million population
• Pennsylvania = 1,891 COVID deaths per million population
• New York = 2,440 COVID deaths per million population
• New Jersey = 2,633 COVID deaths per million population

Recall that Florida has had a much less intense set of masking and other mandates imposed by the state as compared with the others on the list, to the point where our noble guardians of the truth in the American media have pointed out repeatedly how “dangerous” things are in Florida. In most areas of the northeast megalopolis, you can hear people confidently declaring how foolish those restaurant-goers in Florida are — as they cower in their homes behind a double or triple mask. Not many of them realize that their chances of death from COVID are twice as high in lockdown-happy New Jersey as they are in free and easy Florida.

Based on the data above, it seems that we can reiterate the statement in Cohn’s book above that places where there were few or no mask ordinances, the consequences were “no worse”. In fact, they may even be better.