S1E30 / A Second Wave? / Howard Markel

EPIDEMIC with Dr. Celine Gounder

KFF Health News and Just Human Productions

Science, #Coronavirus, Health & Fitness, #Smallpox, Documentary, #Covid19, #Sarscov2, #Eradication, Life Sciences, Society & Culture, #Covid, Medicine

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“So when will it come back? You know, I'm a historian, so I'm uncomfortable with predicting the future, but as a doctor, if I were making a prognosis, I would say it's going to come back.” — Dr. Howard Markel “It does get weary when you see the same mistakes being made over and over and over again. And many of the mistakes of past pandemics are being made today, particularly in how we're administering and reacting to it.“ — Dr. Howard Markel With states gradually starting to re-open, many are wondering whether we will face a second wave of infections. In today’s episode, Dr. Celine Gounder speaks with Dr. Howard Markel, a physician and medical historian at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. They ask the question: can history help us prepare for the future? They discuss the lessons that the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 can teach us about COVID-19, and consider whether the history of the 1918 pandemic is repeating itself in present day. This podcast was created by Just Human Productions. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. We're supported, in part, by listeners like you. #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #COVID #coronavirus

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Dr. Saline Gounder and this is epidemic.
0:08.0	Today is Friday June 19th.
0:14.0	Back in 2015.
0:17.0	Back in 2005, in 2005, Dr. Howard Markel was in his office at the University of Michigan,
0:29.7	wrapping up his week before the 4th of July holiday.
0:33.0	And it was late in the afternoon and I was getting ready for a long weekend when my
0:37.6	secretary said Dr. Markel that the Pentagon is on line 7.
0:41.8	Which Pentagon is on line 7, which made me shake my head and a little bit of wonder because the
0:49.6	Pentagon is never on line 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 five six or seven it was a physician calling from the defense
0:55.8	threat reduction agency by the time Howard got that phone call from the Pentagon
1:00.7	he'd already been studying pandemics and quarantines for almost 20 years.
1:05.6	I'm a physician and a historian of medicine. I'm the Georgie Wants Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan.
1:18.0	The Pentagon was worried about what would happen if there was a bird flu pandemic.
1:23.0	This was back when H5N1 in Bloenza was going around.
1:27.0	The federal government under George W. Bush was very interested in this issue and very concerned and of course
1:35.2	influenza pandemics happen with regularity and we were overdue for a really bad one.
1:43.0	So they asked Howard to join a team of doctors and historians
1:47.0	who were going to try to figure out if there were any lessons
1:50.0	the military could take away from the last big pandemic back in
1:53.8	1918. They wanted us to look at something called escape communities. So these
2:00.9	communities just shut their doors very early on in September of 1918 and didn't open them for several months.
2:09.0	And when they shut their doors completely, they had no cases of flu and no cases of deaths from flu.
	...

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