Lesson No. 1: Have 'proper precautions in place,' says historian Richard Evans. And don't 'try to hush it up.' Thousands died in Hamburg after the government failed to acknowledge a cholera outbreak.
An illustration showing patients being brought to the hospital during Hamburg's 1892 cholera outbreak.An illustration showing patients being brought to the hospital during Hamburg's 1892 cholera outbreak.As British scholar Richard Evans researched the history of pandemics for a book more than 30 years ago, he was struck by the uniformity of how governments from different cultures and different historical periods responded.
As the world comes to terms with how governments have responded to today's coronavirus pandemic, some are looking to history to guide them. Evans is a knighted historian best known for his trilogy of books about the Third Reich, but his study of late-19th-century Hamburg also serves as a guidebook with lessons for political leaders managing today's COVID-19 crisis.
About a decade earlier, German microbiologist Robert Koch identified the bacteria present in one of the deadly diseases of the day, cholera, which is transmitted via excrement in water. The discovery that cholera was waterborne had spurred several of Europe's largest cities to invest in filtration systems for their municipal water supplies — but not Hamburg. Its leaders refused to spend anything to treat its city water.
"And it was delivered to everyone who had a water supply connection," says Evans."And 10,000 people died, roughly speaking, within about six weeks. It was an absolute catastrophe." "In a situation of an ongoing outbreak, the attention of the public focuses on the scientists providing information," says Christoph Gradmann, a medical historian at the University of Oslo.
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