Localized Pain

When the historian Alfred Crosby’s seminal 1976 book, Epidemic and Peace, 1918, was republished in 1989, it was given a catchier title: America’s Forgotten Pandemic. While the current pandemic has brought renewed interest in the “Great Influenza,” it was never really forgotten. After all, it circled the globe in successive waves, infected a third of the population, and accounted for more than 50 million deaths. The scale and depth of that earlier scourge have prompted many comparisons with COVID‑19. Some of these examinations have been ill informed and haphazard; others have been thorough and thoughtful. Observed similarities have included physical-distancing measures to flatten the curve, health care disparities among minority groups, burdens on front-line workers, and the politics of masks. Then, like now, some communities were simply stretched to their limits.

We can...