Dan Snow's History Hit - Coronavirus - Lessons from History

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

Professor John Oxford is a virologist. He is one of the world's leading experts on influenza.He is a leader in the study of the great Influenza outbreak of 100 years ago that killed upwards of 50 million people around the world.I talked to him today to ask him, what are the key lessons that we can learn from past outbreaks.The best way to support the History Hit team who produce this podcast is to subscribe to History Hit TV. The whole podcast archive is exclusively on there, along with hundreds of history documentaries. Use the code pod1 to get 30 days free and then your first month for just £1. Please signup at www.HistoryHit.TV Thank you!

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit, an important podcast this one. As the markets tumble, as people panic buy, we've got a historical, we've got the long view on coronavirus, on influenza. We're talking to one of the world's leading virologists. Professor John Oxford is the UK's top expert on influenza. He's Emeritus Professor of Virology at the University of London. His work on the 1918 strain of influenza, known as Spanish flu, is world famous. He's the founder of Retro Screen Virology, and that is a leader in the fields of vaccine antiviral clinical trials over the last 20 years. He's a man who works trying to create antiviral drugs every day, but he's also a man who's gone into enormous detail looking at the outbreak of influenza during and after the First World War. And I just wanted to ask him some very

simple questions. What are the lessons from history? What are the lessons from previous influenza outbreaks that can help us overcome this one? One of the reasons, surely, for knowing your history is so that we are armed, we are forewarned, we are prepared for the next time similar events happen to those that have happened in the past. Nothing is ever of course a perfect parallel, a perfect reflection, but there are things that we learn in all sorts of fields that we can build on and improve and can potentially provide us with a lifeline in times like this. For those of you who have been asking how they can support us at Team History Hit, the best way to do that is to subscribe to History Hit TV.

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is professor john oxford i really hope you find this useful enjoy john thank you very much for coming on the podcast yeah pleasure so we are you're a brilliant human being because you you you're a you're a scientist but also a historian really, so you can help us untangle the lessons of the great flu pandemic of the second decade of the 20th century. Let's start with things that we can learn because you've broadcast about this subject very effectively. What is the number one lesson that human beings, that scientists derived from the great flu pandemic of the of the first world war in the years following well i tell you what um i derive from it personally but i can before i do that let me say one thing you mentioned i've got an interest in history but i also have a medical um historian

in tow with me and that's douglas gill and so we tend to work together on that I tend to do the virology and a bit of the history he tends to do the history in a spot of virology so that we make quite a nice team now your question about um what do I pull out from when I think uh about the outbreak what I what I pull out is um based on the great Gauguin painting the great scientific painting the last one he painted, the one he loved most, the one they can't move out from Boston where it is. And it's a great painting as a triptych. Where have we come from?

He entitled it, where have we come from? Who are we and where are we going? And I often think of that because it's absolutely perfect for this sort of thing, a great infection. So where have we come from? We have come from a world of infection. That's Gauguin's world. We're still in that world.

Things have not changed in 100 or how many years it is. Gauguin's time, 1890, painted it, I think. It is still a world of infection. We've only eradicated two organisms, smallpox and rinderpest. All the other bacteria and viruses are still out there. So we're still in a world of infection we've only eradicated two organisms that's smallpox and rinderpest all the other bacteria and viruses are still out there so we're still in a world of infection and then he asked the question where are we going well i think we're we're still there hopefully we are going in a more scientific direction than we have in the past but i think even there i worry about it sometimes with people who believe that evolution didn't happen.

There's a flat earth and all that sort of thing. And then the biggest question of all, who are we? And I think in these great cataclysmic events, and I'm not saying this, the one at the moment is a great cataclysmic event, but it is certainly stirring everyone up, including myself. We don't know how we're going to react until we're faced with it. And I remember this when the SARS outbreak started, I had a telephone call, fairly irate, an agitated call from a lady anesthetist. And she said, look, first of all, you don't know anything about it.

And I said, well, none of us know anything about it. And secondly, she said, well, I'm on the front line. I don't want to be here. I didn't join. If I wanted to be on the front line, I could sign up with Medicines Sans Frontieres. But here I am in an anaesthetist and I'm not coming into work. So I thought then, you know, we are confronted.

We don't know until we get that confrontation what is going to happen. And I give everything to those nurses and doctors at the moment, in China particularly, which is where we're facing. If we want to find out anything about this, how to stop it, where it came from, all this sort of thing, they've already gave their lives, some of them, in this endeavour to stop an infection, and that will happen here as well. Right, well, that's the big headline thought.

Thank you. What was the nature of the flu outbreak that began in 1917-18. We hear now about this being a disease that attacks the respiratory system. We hear that it disproportionately affects people who are immunocompromised or older people. Is that different or similar to 1917? What hit them in 1918, I think, in the face,

and what hits us and what hits me when I go into a library and look around, is the people who were hit, themselves hit by this great wave, the first great wave that came in, in 1918, in the summer of 1918. And they were young people. They were not the elderly group.

They were not the particularly young group. They were a specific age. They were 27, 28, 29 and 30 year olds. That's where the highest mortality was. And to be frank about it, we are still grappling with that. Why did it hit that particular age group? And you're quite right. We are grappling with things from the past

and trying to work out, indeed, what happened there. And I think as we do that, that can give us a pointer here. We found out, all of us working around the world on this on this project uh that or we think we found out that they must have had a particular history these 28 29 30 coming from the past they must have um either missed out a flu wave you know 20 years before um and or alternatively the opposite they've got got one for themselves, but they were different. They must have been different in their past history of flu. And then for some reason or other, they were knocked off their feet. The elderly group, who where you would normally expect,

as you quite rightly say, to be hit on the head, like what's happening now with COVID-19, they were completely free of it. They sailed through the 1918. Unfortunately, the younger age group, the children, didn't sail through. They were afflicted, not as bad as the 27, 28, 29 year olds, but they were certainly afflicted. And of course, that is one of the big conundrums at the moment with the COVID, because it's not seen to be producing much pathology or much serious infection in children it's just going for the other age groups and the elderly what was done in was anything effective done in

uh the the great flu pandemic that helped to lessen them well are there any successes are there any things that we can that we can use today to combat this next pandemic yes there's a lot I think because after all when I wake up in the morning I woke up this morning thinking we're going to do this I thought right what I really like to do and what I really like to have is a pill in my pocket labelled anti-covid-19 or anti-coronavirus pill that I could take if I'd been in contact with the case or if I began been in contact with the case, or if I began to get ill, take the tablet. That is an antiviral drug. But there isn't such a pill. The second thing I'd like to have is a diagnostic kit, one that would give me the answer in 15 minutes. And I think that could be developed, but certainly not at the moment. And the other thing

I'd like to have for the more medium term is a vaccine. But that's not there either. So in a sense, this is the awesome thing about it we're sitting here now in the same sense if we'd been 100 to whatever it is 120 years ago um which is we were as we are unarmed and that's not a very happy situation to be in either i can i can tell you that and the first time i've ever been in such a situation in a pandemic and i've gone through the flu pandemics in 57 68 you know um 77 2009 there's always been this this background if we've got something behind us don't worry we will be okay antibiotics and all that here um we're pretty helpless in a way and i sometimes wonder why we've got ourselves in this spot but having said all that in 1918 they really began to get a moving on they use the same sort of techniques we're using

now quarantine public health hand washing of course the pictures are famous from that time with the masks everyone you know the New York policemen wearing masks the famous picture of what was going on in 1918 but the same sort of ways of doing it and it did seem to work because they published people have gone through the data uh a few years ago of what happened in the great cities in the united states for example and they compared them they compared what action they took if they took no action at all and some of them didn't take any action for reasons best known to themselves uh the riots roared in cause cause trouble a lot of trouble um deaths and illness and they roared out again just roared through

in no and they were caught napping they couldn't cope with it in country in in cities where they said right we'll try hand washing um and then we'll see how that goes and then if that doesn't work we'll go on to a mask and if that doesn't work we'll go on social distancing that didn't do much good either this this this just try this try that try something else in those cities where they threw everything at this virus everything at the same time the hand washing the mask the social distancing the closing of schools the closing of theatres threw it at them what happened there was uh you flattened that the epidemic hit the curve which was going up in other cities didn't go up so steeply it was

kind of prolonged but that meant you haven't you had more time to deal with things there wasn't so much panic around f flapping around, because you could keep businesses going, keep things going, as the outbreak was prolonged. So they did things, some cities did, and you can ask why some did and some didn't, and there's a danger point there as well. So if in 1918 to 19... What are the approximate dates? Do we think it began in 1917 or did it begin in 1918? I think personally it began in... There were indications in the British Army

of things going on, of respiratory things going on in Holdershop Banks, for example, where the recruits were coming in, in about 1916. And by the end of 1916, the winter of 1916-17, there began to be outbreaks. It wasn't apparent immediately to the pathologists. And they were on the lookout for things because by the First World War,

the British Army and other armies had realised that an infection was a thing that could decimate an army. You know, since the Battle of the War, you had to make sure, in the Crimean War, you make sure the bell war you had to make sure and the crimea war you make sure the infection was down and they increased the hygiene hand washing disinfected and what they're all doing that but in spite of that by 1916 17 there was quite a lot of it seemed to be a lot of strange deaths around mainly in the great army camps that were pulled in in older

shop barracks near l and along the Western Front and to get a grasp of all this we have to appreciate the size of this endeavor on the Western Front Britain was emptied or half emptied of all its doctors all its pathologists all and nurses not all of them about about 60 percent of them were moved to the Western Front and they joined these huge encampments all the way along for 100 miles along there where these hospitals were built with pathology laboratories were built and they were set up to bring in casualties war wounded and then they began to bring in casualties as well of medical casualties and they began to note that something was up and a small team of pathologists

three of them actually working at etapa which is one of the biggest camps holding maybe 30 holding on one day a hundred thousand troops while they were sorting out they had enough hospitals for 20 000 so it was a big endeavor and in that environment they began to notice something odd but it wasn't until a pathologist arrived and a morbid anatomist arrived just after christmas that they began to sort out odd. But it wasn't until a pathologist arrived and a morbid anatomist arrived just after Christmas that they began to sort out exactly what was going on. And then they realised that a lot of these soldiers had been dying. They'd been dying of something that was strangely looking like influenza

in the pathology. It looked a little strange. But then they thought to themselves, well, if it was influenza, why wasn't it spreading? Could it be influenza? And so they decided on a halfway house it was new this disease they published in the Lancet it was new but it perhaps it wasn't quite influenza it was something else it wasn't spreading so maybe they didn't didn't have to panic on it

now all these years later we can look back and say well hang on a minute that's just like it is in Hong Kong at the moment or over the years the recent years there's been a bird flu could spread around the world but it's not it's just holding itself in Hong Kong at the moment or over the years, the recent years. There's been a bird flu, could spread around the world, but it's not. It's just holding itself in Hong Kong for the moment. Perhaps it will spread, but it's not at the moment. And I think that's what was happening at Etapla. At that moment, they discovered it was a high mortality in those soldiers, just like bird flu is a high mortality in Hong Kong when it hits people. But it's not got the ability to spread.

So at the moment, it needs to mutate and change. And I think the outbreak, personally, the outbreak started there in Europe in 1916, 17. The conflicting idea, the other idea, is that it started in the United States, in Kansas, more or less a bit later than that at the same time. And that China is a possibility, but very low down on the scheme of things for for starting by the time it's sweeping through famously the big u.s cities uh how does it compare and we all know the figures now we're all amateurs like me are all terribly knowledgeable now a little bit of information is a dangerous thing and we talk about 3.4 percent the world

health organization and uh what what what kind of it was the Was the disease similar in terms of its danger to what we are seeing today? No, I wouldn't put it like that. I think there's too much comparison. It definitely works people up. As you say, everyone, we've all got to think, I go to meetings, it's pretty strange, and always have and people argue even scientists argue oh they say well did 50 million people die or did 60 million people and in a flash of a moment we've we've got rid of 10 million people and sometimes i've been to meetings 100 million people have died in 1918 so we bandy around the figures and to personally i think that it's it unnerves people that it unnerves me,

and I've spent a lifetime in it. And I'd rather concentrate on one. What I've always wanted to do with this pandemic is look at one person who died, and then from that you can get something useful from it. How did that one person react? How did their family react? And you can then multiply it by the figure you like.

I don't think this outbreak now, the COVID-19, has got any similarity in numbers to the 19, or to indeed any other flu pandemic. Because after all, in recent pandemics, I mean, this recent year in England, we've had 5,000, 6,000 people die of flu and no one seemed to bother about it. They've only just stopped dying because of the end of the flu season,

the end of the winter. And that's one thing I think about this COVID-19. It's missed its chance, actually, because they love the wintertime. We're all crowded indoors, swapping, changing tails with each other and getting infected. Once the spring starts, all these respiratory infections begin to drop. And you could look at it another way in the pandemic of 1918 that virus hit first of all went a big way in the in june that year may june that year it's not far from where we are now but it hit the summer

they didn't do all that well didn't do well at all and everyone's relaxed and then by november back it came and people didn't relax that's when the main mortality of the figures were talking about a lot of it about half of the mortality came in october november 1918 and then i suppose people relax again which is a not a sensible thing to do because in february it's back again and and the other half got swallowed up So that is telling us that beware of these respiratory viruses. Take all the precautions you can, that they won't knock in and knock everyone off, as it were, in one great wave.

They won't. It'll be a number of waves. So that can give some reassurance of of of what could happen now but be pretty careful with them and that when they're in this way they're unpredictable they do like the seasonal they do they can come in the summer but they like the winter period as all these respiratory infections do and that is a big component the negative component the spring and the summer can be a positive affair so the best practice you're saying in 1918 with with um squished down that big that squished the flattened the graph effectively what what else could have been done i mean what what have we learned

in the hundred years since that is going to make us even more resilient and better able to deal with this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive,

but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. We've learnt that they struggled, that they were faced with something that we've had preparation for. Do you remember, we've had plans drawn up. Every country in the world was asked by the World Health Organisation since 1997 when the bird flu began moving from birds to humans to prepare for a pandemic. plans drawn up every country in the world was asked by the world health organization since 97

when the bird flu began moving from birds to humans to prepare for a pandemic get the plans out every factory every you know we've got plans all over the place they're bulging out of doors the plans uh but the biggest lesson is to move with all you've got quickly that's what i derive from it why wait if you're going to have all this these things like the the layered approach why are you doing the one bit a minute one this why are you saying this is a hand this band handshaking now but we'll let kissing go ahead or you know it just seems silly it just seems silly and it seems that we've not learned anything from from 1918 what i've learned from it was faced with a new virus like this,

you throw everything at it as soon as possible. Is the counter-argument, of course, that poor old politicians don't hear that very often, but they're trying to balance the resilience to a new disease against widespread economic dislocation that could have years. We know people die when the economy goes south. People lose their jobs. People at the margins, economic margins society, suffer extreme hardship. And actually mortality goes up there.

So is it quite difficult for politicians to know when it's, you know, this is not a drill. This is the real one. I mean, what are the signals that you have to, what are the triggers for when you would say, right, let's throw the kitchen sink at it? Well, I said the trigger that you have to, what are the triggers for when you would say, right, let's throw the kitchen sink at it? Well, I said the trigger that I have is when the infection starts in your own country

and you think it could be pandemic because you've just looked at another country, that is China. And you look there and you say, my goodness me, what's going on? Although we have to remember that in China now, they've had 3,000 deaths in a population of what, 1 billion?

And they've had maybe 100,000 infections in a population of a billion. So it's not as though the whole country has been swarmed over with it. And that's another lesson we learned from 1918 and from subsequent pandemics, actually, in 57, 68, that this virus does not come in. These viruses, that's flu. They don't come in, and I suspect it's the same with COVID-19, they don't come in and sweep over the whole country like that. They will come in waves,

and even in a wave, some areas won't be hit at all. So you could have a situation where London, you know, where there's a lot of people coming in flying, gets a whack. And up in Northamptonshire or somewhere, they wonder what on earth's going on. So it could be spotted, and sometimes these pandemics and this one I was hoping in 1968 I was a virologist by 1968 and I remember the discussion in the lab Sir Charles Stuart

Harris was the one in charge and he was very he was always a bit bossy and he came in he said right you know this is it 68 but it's going to come roaring in you know but it didn't it went roaring in the united states and in england nothing happened or hardly anything happened and the next year not all that much happened and then the year after it did so there was a delay um in some european countries and some european countries didn't get in at all and i remember remember Poland they said what this pandemic in 68 what's it all about then so it can be a bit dotted around and not consistent as well and that can sometimes help you now as regards politicians and virologists people like me I'm not doing their job for them that's up to them to do their job my job is to analyze the medical scientific impact of a

great infection and i think that i would i would not want to see that i'm not going to sacrifice my granddad just because they some because the something can carry on and make some money and that's not the way i look at it i'm here to prevent and do all my best to prevent getting ill, prevent people getting ill and prevent people dying of a disease that is nasty and in the end will be prevented. I wouldn't want to look back after this and say, my grandchild, I've got plenty of them, I can tell you, and they'll say to me, well, what did you do then, granddad, during the great COVID-19? And I say, well, I sat on my hands and did nothing. Or I was very worried about whether the railway companies would make less money during that time

because there's less traveling. I don't want to be involved in that. That's not my role. My role is saying, well, I helped. I tried to develop a vaccine. I tried to develop a mask or an antiviral and persuade people to go out there and not shake hands, not kiss, not hug,

not do those things that this virus loves i mean you don't catch this virus on the road or on a tree you catch it from someone else and you catch it when they breathe on you or cough on you either way and they're pretty close to you so the simple thing is to keep away from people which is called social distancing okay so there we go so another lesson from history social listening talk us through it so if you maintain that invisible box is it a two meter square around yourself yes less than that i think and myself but you can argue it out because there's a lot of information has been taken out of the flu world the plans and all that and just thrown across to the covid19 world and i'm not so sure that it's all applicable. And this is two-meter business.

If you, and I think now we're thinking less that these infections are spread by coughing and sneezing. You know, you don't sneeze when you've got flu. And I don't think you sneeze when you've got COVID-19. You cough, but you're not coughing all the time. What you're mainly doing all the time is breathing. So you ask yourself, well, hang on a minute, the viruses in your upper airways and perhaps in your lower airways it's there in very large numbers

we're talking about a billion ten billion viruses in the small area so when you breathe do they come pushed out with their breath because you're breathing a lot of litres of air all the time so is it tidal breathing this that's um spreading And my answer is, I think it is. And the way I look at it is, if you get close enough to someone to smell their breath, if they've had garlic for breakfast and you can smell garlic, you are breathing in their breath and they're breathing in yours. And so that is pretty close. It's probably a couple of feet away and you're facing them out as well.

Which is why handshaking should be cut out in spite of the virologists that our prime minister virologists and the american president virologist telling us they're going to continue doing things they've always done the thing about handshaking is it brings you close into someone and you face them normally and so you begin to smell their breath and you will begin to pick up their viruses i think so you know there, there are things that we can do and I hope people are going to do it as soon as possible. Okay, so social distancing works. That's a good lesson from history.

In terms of our resilience as a society, in terms of, you know, we now have amazing people like you working away at stuff. Are we, stupid question from a lay person, but developing drugs that can help? How different are we now to where we were in 1918 with our AI and our teams of people like you?

Well, it's not a silly question to ask. And in fact, when I look back now, a few years, I think, what have we done? Are we responsible? Am I responsible as a virologist why didn't i react differently in 2000 after 2003 so here's a coronavirus i i dealt with coronaviruses like 50 years ago when i was a student i used to there were innocent little things innocent family in humans anyway causing respiratory disease coughs and they were among the common cold viruses that we all have every year they're still around just around now but they're innocent they're not never cured anyone in their life as far as i can see a

coronavirus and i had a little chance i've just been isolated these coronas down at the common cold unit in salisbury a quarantine unit where they studied these common calls and my little task was to grow it up look at it and you break my break my hands get myself into the laboratory um and so i'd have a history of looking at them dealing with them and suddenly in 2003 what happened so this sars coronavirus suddenly appears now we're all taken by you know a coronavirus causing that don't believe it but it did but of course what happened was using the public health methods that we're using now quarantine social distancing so on it was snuffed out really alongside the fact that these coronas don't

they haven't got the get get up and go that influenza has got you just don't they just don't if we were in this this infection caused by influenza we wouldn't be talking about three deaths as bad as that is and 60 cases we'd be talking about a thousand deaths or a couple of thousand and a hundred thousand cases who was flu it's got the get up and go and it's got the zip but these these coronaviruses don't have that. So you could say, well, all right, we hit SARS and it hit itself on the head. 6,000 people in a globe of 8 billion got infected in 20 different countries and then it vanished. Now, that was the problem because it did its damage, which wasn't very nice.

And then we all thought, well, it's over. This is a very rare phenomenon of corona. It's one in a poke in the moon sort of thing. So how could I go along, I suppose, is my only excuse to a pharmaceutical group and say, why don't you spend £2 billion making a vaccine? And they'd turn around and say, well, how many people died? And I'd say, well, 300.

And they'd say, well, you know, there are other more important infections around. And the same with antivirals and the same with diagnostic kits. And so we coasted along until a few years and suddenly there was another one coming from a camel and from a bat the sir the sars came from a bat to a civic cat in a market in guandong the next one came from a bat into possibly a rat and then into a camel and into humans in saudi and still we didn't react and now suddenly we've got this one

so i think there's been a lack of reaction i must say that on the part of the scientific community the virological community well really perhaps we should have got our kits together and got moving well don't blame yourself but i but because um i'm sure you still have more than nearly everybody else on the planet put together but i but i'm asking like what it now that now that you are taking it seriously, are you hopeful? I mean, can things move much faster than they did in 1918, for example? Well, that's a nice way of putting it.

Everything's moving faster. And I think the population movements, that helps the virus move around. My goodness, the number of people travelling. My children never seem to be around. They're always in Timbuktu or somewhere. You'd get on a plane, go, go pay 50 pounds and you're there so it's a world of movement that's fantastic for a virus spreading um but on the other hand it helps us communicate with with i'm in touch with people i mean i phone you daily to australia to find to talk to my colleague there to find out

what's going on and so on and so forth so we we're in touch, all right, and that helps as well. So I think we're reacting more. And I noticed recently, what pleased me, 50,000 molecules for repurposing, what's called repurposing. We've all been busy making drugs against HIV, hepatitis C, B, influenza. There's a new influenza drug. But we can maybe repurpose them. We can say, well, we've developed this drug against smallpox.

I mean, for example, years and years ago. Could that possibly have an effect against COVID-19 out of all expectations? So 50,000 of those arrived last week at probably the most famous laboratory eric de clerck's laboratory in the university of louvain in belgium these probably the most famous antiviral chemotherapists 50 000 of these drugs arrived they're going to screen the whole lot against this new virus in the laboratory and see if one of them um will be a hit they can do that quite quickly there's already three hits. There's remdesivir.

There is a nucleotide analogue drug, which I think looks pretty good. A young virologist from Holland has put it through a macaque model. It looks, against science, it looked like it could work. So we're not absolutely totally bereft. We're almost bereft, but not quite. So now I think the Chinese are working on that too.

So I've got great expectations that because of this international issue with the way we're all cooperating that someone will pull an antiviral drug out of the cupboard or discover one new that can be done quite quickly the vaccine business is much more difficult although some of the methodologies have shortened the thing you've still got a lot of control a lot of biology to do a lot of worry about giving a biological to a person so i don't see a matching of actually coming along um for another may 18 months that that's the thing that's that's fit and safe what we have done and i was very proud about it um we began to focus on this pandemic

several years ago in fact soon after the bird flu started coming up and in Hong Kong and we thought I look around look around but there isn't a monument there isn't a kind of the world is full of monuments to soldiers mainly men who died in the first world war my father was in it he didn't die but he was in it he shouldn't have been in it um and the places come in every village in britain where is the monument to the 200 000 britain's english people who died in the pandemic there isn't one and so we had an opportunity just behind the london hospital there's a church called st philip's and st augustine it's kind of a victorian church and in the second world war all the glass windows were blown out in a bombing attack and we had the

opportunity of putting them back and getting them redesigned and so we we got one my group did one and we based it on gogan the painting i told you about where and it's a triptych window in in deep deep blues um and deep reds and things but it's it's it's a wonderful window and it's the commemorative window for people who died um and it issued a medal to families who helped each other in 1918 and it brought out and most often it brought out the best in people uh it issued a memorial medal to doctors and nurses not only in the hospital not in the royal london but everywhere who put their lives on hold to help other people. But particularly, I feel, personally, it offers a medal to women.

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echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week who in their own homes helped people it was a virus where and i think this is going to be the same if people do die um there are a lot of people will die quietly at home and i was funding a series of letters by a young woman called gwen a welsh woman she's 21 i think and she was fine she was writing to her mother every day. Her mother was in another valley in Wales. They'd write back and forth. And three days before she died, when she was young, she was in the age group

almost that the mortality was most, she was saying, I'm fine, Mum. Dad's a bit worried about me. Don't you worry, you worry about yourself. And she was being looked after by the family. She didn't realise that it was going to be done. And suddenly the letter stopped. I'm fine, I'm fine, don't you worry about me.

You worry about yourself. So this letter, this memorial, this window, is called The Remembrance of the Men and Women, particularly the women who died in the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and who helped each other. That sounds very beautiful. I'm going to go and check it out next time i'm there so we'll end it there but thank you very much so the lessons

from history is government should act fast we should distance ourselves and and then in within our family units any advice for how we like how we can be more like gwen everyone it's like crowdfunding you know everyone does a little bit to get president obama give ten dollars to get him elected you don't need to just a few squillionaires um everyone can do a little bit here and i'm not joking here uh everyone does that a bit if you say what are you doing all right i'm not going to i'm not going around the world not going to flip over to france i'm going to use fewer aircraft and so anything where you could get in contact with people and spread anything where you could get in contact

with people and spread it if you have got it yourself inadvertently you can do things by over the next few months and I think we'll have to take and I accept your point about the economic here so I think we'll have just have to take that we're a wealthy country after all we are and you know we do less traveling we go go to fewer football matches and fewer rugby matches. That could be someone's big sacrifice. They look after their grandparents because they could have a jolly good time and their children have a good time. They bring home a gift of ours to their grandparents, which would kill them.

So they keep an eye on that and they behave properly. So they keep an eye on that and they behave properly. They do not start blaming China for all this and the Chinese. No one blames Britain for starting the pandemic in 1918. And I think we did start it because all the First World War and the crowding and the things going on and the things that remembrance of things in 1918 when it finished. Or if it started in America, we don't blame america for starting the pandemic which killed 50 million people and we cannot blame the chinese either otherwise we're really getting into problems here so i'd like to see more careful thought a lot of careful we can do it everyone can do this thought and also a personal contribution

with the hand washing, the social distancing, and all the things we know have worked in the past and can work now. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

all were gone and finished and liquidated. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. He tells us what is possible, not just in the pages of history books, but in our own lives as well. I have faith in you hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if you don't become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just do me a favorites for free go to itunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review purge yourself give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost

it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. you