History repeats itself.
August in Chicago is hot and humid. The overnight low temperature on August 23, 1954 was 74 degrees and the humidity was somewhere in the range of 90%. The window fans, for those who had them did little but move the heavy moisture laden air around providing little or no cooling. The prediced high temperature for a muggy Monday was near 100 degrees. It would be an ideal day for a child to spend at the beach, or at one of the park district pools or perhaps in an infatable kiddie pool in the backyard with the hose playing cold water over you to cool you down.
The public was horribly and understandably frightened by polio. There was no prevention and no cure. Everyone was at risk, especially children.
There was nothing a parent could do to protect the family.
I grew up in this era.
Each summer, polio would come like The Plague. Beaches and pools would close — because of the fear that the poliovirus was waterborne.
Children had to say away from crowds, so they often were banned from movie theaters, bowling alleys, and the like.
My mother gave us a ‘polio test’ each day: Could we touch our toes and put our chins to our chest? Every stomach ache or stiffness caused a panic. Was it polio?
I remember the awful photos of children on crutches, in wheelchairs and iron lungs. And coming back to school in September to see the empty desks where the children hadn’t returned.”
Parents tried “social distancing”—ineffectively and out of fear. Fearful of the spread of the contagious virus, the city closed pools, swimming holes, movie theaters, schools and churches, forcing priests to reach out to their congregations on local radio. Some motorists who had to stop for gas would not fill up their deflated tires, afraid they’d bring home air containing the infectious virus.
The virus was poliomyelitis, a highly contagious disease with symptoms including common flu-like symptoms such as sore throat, fever, tiredness, headache, a stiff neck and stomach ache. For a few though, polio affected the brain and spinal cord, which could lead meningitis and, for one out of 200, paralysis. For two to 10 of those suffering paralysis, the end result was death.
After World War II, Americans doused their neighborhoods, homes and children with the highly toxic pesticide DDT in the hope of banishing polio, Elena Conis reports in the journal Environmental History. Yet, the number of cases grew larger each season.
Most people who got polio suffered much milder symptoms — usually headache, stiff neck, fever and muscle soreness — that subsided in a few days or weeks.
After an outbreak in San Angelo, Texas the city council voted to close all indoor meeting places for one week. But the local epidemic didn’t pass that quickly, and by June hospitals were filled with patients. Tourism stopped because people didn’t want to be there. Cleaning fanaticism was the rule of the day. Most indoor theaters and bowling alleys stayed closed simply because people were afraid (no evidence of any fines or prosecutions).
This experience repeated itself in most places in the country where there were outbreaks. City councils would encourage the following of the directives of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later the March of Dimes), which circulated a list of “polio precautions” for parents to follow. Some towns and cities across the United States tried to prevent the spread of polio by closing swimming pools, libraries, and movie theaters (not restaurants or barber shops) on a temporary basis but mostly in a way consistent with the public mood stemming from fear and confusion.
What’s remarkable in light of the near-global coercive lockdown for COVID-19 is how the terrible and terrifying disease of polio was managed almost entirely by a private and voluntary system of health professionals, innovators, parental responsibility, localized caution, and individual volition and caution where needed. It was an imperfect system because the virus was so vicious, cruel, and random. But precisely because there were no national or state lockdowns – and only very limited local closures done mostly in a way consistent with citizen fear – the system remained adaptive to changing conditions.
This was a time when, even for this ghastly disease that maimed innocent young children, medical problems were widely seen to have medical solutions and not political ones.
Yes, there were clear policy responses to these past pandemics, but they targeted the most vulnerable populations to keep them safe, while leaving everyone else alone. Polio was especially bad for school children, but that meant they closed the schools temporarily, in cooperation with parents and the community.
The current pandemic is different because, instead of targeting the vulnerable populations, we’ve gone for society-wide one size fits all at nearly the national and global level, and certainly the state level. That’s never happened – not with polio, not with the Spanish flu, the 1957 flu, the 1968 flu, or anything else.
As the health officials said of the polio epidemic: “Nobody can shut down intercourse of people in communities.” Our rights survived. So did human liberty, free enterprise, the Bill of Rights, jobs, and the American way of life. And then polio was eventually eradicated.
The slogan for polio eradication – “Do everything you can within reason” – seems like a good rule of thumb for the management of future pandemics.