Also read India’s quest to fix its payments puzzleWhen the virus threat became clear last March, the political authorities naturally turned for guidance to specialists in the discipline known as public health, and specifically to professional epidemiologists who had worked with previous viruses, such as AIDS or Ebola.
In a fortnight, epidemiology was effectively given unprecedented authority over the daily lives of the world’s citizens.In turn, these specialists took as guidance the global pandemic their profession understood—the Spanish flu outbreak from 1918 to 1920.
Based on the evidence from this 100-year-old pandemic, their advice to the world’s political leadership was: Send your national populations home, and keep them there.