Why the Great Epizootic of 1872 should give us hope for change after COVID-19

The virus swept through nearly every major city in the U.S. and Canada over the course of a year. It killed 1-2 percent of its victims and kept the rest out of work for weeks. Cities grew chaotic. Public transportation ceased to operate. Food shortages and price gouging ensued. Economies ground to a halt.

Sound eerily familiar? There’s a major difference between this event, the Great Epizootic of 1872-1873, and the one we’re experiencing today, however; the Great Epizootic infected horses, not humans.

Throughout most of the 19th century, the horse served as a primary energy source in the U.S. Horses hauled goods, transported people, powered agricultural work, and fueled the Industrial Revolution. In this era before widespread electricity and automobiles, they were essential to business and everyday life.

The Great Epizootic alarmed the human population of the U.S. It wasn’t the first horse disease outbreak to spread through the country—for example, glanders, an extremely contagious and deadly disease, infected 11,000 military horses during the Civil War—but its consequences were far-reaching and impossible to ignore. 

As I’ve been making final edits to my book, Equus Rising: How the Horse Shaped U.S. History (May 2020), in which I discuss the Great Epizootic, I’ve been finding myself drawing parallels between that event and today’s COVID-19 pandemic.

The Great Epizootic, along with other horse epidemics of the last half of the 1800s, spurred structural changes. For starters, formal, accredited veterinary schools began to crop up in the U.S. with the main objective of caring for the horse as a means of protecting the economy. (Yes, providing compassionate care to your sweet family pet was an afterthought.)

Second, having experienced them first hand, people began to understand the economic dangers of complete reliance on an animal that could get sick and taken out of the workforce. To reduce the risk of a Great Epizootic replay, the U.S. needed to find alternative forms of energy. Horse epidemics helped to catalyze the development and adoption of these new energy sources.

The fact that horse epidemics drove societal change is relevant today. Sure, we’re dealing with a human pandemic, but we’re witnessing many of the same consequences horse pandemics caused 150 years ago, including personal and economic disruptions. The resulting shifts following those epidemics give us hope for sweeping improvements in the societal failings COVID-19 has and will starkly reveal.

For as long as I can remember, epidemiologists have been warning us that a pandemic was a “when” not “if” scenario and that our country was woefully unprepared for it. In fact, just five months ago, a draft report evaluating the government’s pandemic preparedness determined our ability to coordinate a response to a pandemic is abysmal. (This report just became public.)

We are unprepared—not because the idea of a pandemic should surprise anyone, but because we often ignore threats that haven’t been a part of our personal experiences. We can think of them as simply hypothetical instead of looming if we haven’t lived through them ourselves.

I’m hopeful that after witnessing firsthand how broken or inadequate so many of our systems are, those of us who come out the other side of this pandemic—and that’s most of us—will demand extensive improvements across numerous sectors. None of us has an excuse to shy away; now, whether we previously understood these problems or not, we’re experiencing them personally. In our businesses. In our homes. In our bank accounts. Below are some of the areas in which I see potential for improvements following the pandemic.

Government: Pandemic/disaster preparedness and leadership
Whether we’ve ever been ready for a pandemic, recent missteps by the Trump administration likely increased our vulnerability: dismantling the National Security Council pandemic team in 2018 (here is a piece from someone who had previously led that team about the role they would have played in handling our response to COVID-19); largely ignoring a draft report released five months ago following a pandemic simulation that declared the U.S. was vastly underprepared to handle a pandemic; canceling the global PREDICT program that same month, which sought to identify, track, and research emerging zoonotic diseases; and initially denying the pandemic was a threat to the U.S when evidence showed we needed to be aggressively working to contain it.

And what happened at the CDC? Who made the deadly decision not to use the WHO test kits or to appropriately scale-up the manufacturing and distribution of our own, rendering us unable to identity, track, and contain cases?

The government can no longer find excuses to brush our pandemic/disaster unpreparedness under the rug and redirect funding away from it. We’re all experiencing the consequences of denial and inadequate preparation. Now is the time for us to demand accountability in this area at every level of government.

U.S Health Care “System” / Lack of U.S. Health Care “System”
We don’t actually have one “health care system” in the U.S. We have numerous dislocated systems, many of which are underfunded and inaccessible to many Americans. Despite increases in coverage due to the Affordable Care Act, 27.5 million people in the U.S. did not have health insurance for the entire year in 2018. Health care costs have skyrocketed, even for those with coverage. This study showed the U.S. spends about twice as much on health care as 10 other high-income countries do, but has the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate among them. Globally, the U.S. ranks 43rd in life expectancy at birth.

The cracks in our ability to provide adequate health care to all Americans will show up—and already have been—in bas-relief as we analyze the consequences of the pandemic here and compare them to the results in countries with some type of universal health coverage and a willingness to introduce more aggressive public health measures. (South Korea’s management of the crisis has been astoundingly different from our own, for example.) We know our “health care system” lags behind many other countries’, but data may soon provide an even blunter picture that might convince more people it’s time to change our ways.

Emergency Preparedness
Why have hospital administrators not stockpiled masks, gowns, gloves, and ventilators, when they’ve always known a pandemic was imminent? It’s unfathomable, and I don’t have answers for you. (I’m not sure how much of this preparation should fall to the government versus hospitals, but I’m not impressed with the preparedness strategies of either right now.) No medical professional should be forced to confront a pandemic with a homemade mask. I hope the administers at every hospital are reprioritizing future spending right now to adequately protect their staffs.

Telemedicine
Telemedicine is a growing industry, and about half of U.S. hospitals already use some form of it. During this pandemic, many providers have suspended most or all in-office appointments and are providing telemedicine instead. Analyzing the results of this larger-scale deployment of telemedicine could help us to better understand in which conditions it provides the most efficient and effective way to deliver care and improve accessibility.

Anti-Vaxxers 
Anti-vaxxers benefit from the protection of herd immunity—large numbers of people who have been vaccinated or have already been exposed to a disease. But now they’re personally experiencing what happens when a disease spreads in the absence of a protective herd. It’s scary. It’s disruptive. It’s deadly. And it demonstrates what a world without vaccines did look like until relatively recently and would look like again if we reverted back to one. Might this experience shift some views?

Education
I’ve read numerous estimates that those of us with young kids should plan to save several hundred thousand dollars per child to send them to in-state universities. (Here’s one calculator.) For most of us, that number is laughably out of the question. We’ve got to find alternative ways to provide higher education to our children, or it’s just not going to happen.

Distance learning has, of course, been expanding for years, but some universities are hesitant to move their instruction online and make it more financially accessible to greater numbers of people. Now the pandemic is forcing them to teach online. I hope this move to virtual instruction will continue to demonstrate that online education is feasible and legitimate when done well.

Business
About one-quarter of civilian workers in the U.S. don’t have access to any type of sick leave. Perhaps the pandemic has shown companies that if they don’t allow and encourage employees to stay home when sick, they could go to work and spread a plague that could have disastrous implications for the company’s financial future. Society, and the companies within it, benefit when sick people stay home. Will the pandemic serve as a wakeup call for companies that don’t provide sick leave?

Small businesses are already struggling and shutting down after just a week or two without in-person customers. I hope this required “opportunity” to quickly spin up alternative revenue streams or ways to sell their products makes many of these businesses less vulnerable to future disruption.

Climate
We’re already seeing preliminary data that forced lockdowns, and even the encouragement to “shelter in place,” has temporarily reduced dangerous emissions around the world. (You can find some interesting related articles here, here, and here.) More data on this subject will emerge in coming months. I hope climate scientists will run with it both as a means to demonstrate that our collective actions can reduce emissions and to develop creative solutions for reducing emissions in the future.

There is hope yet
The Great Epizootic is just one example of how epidemics have catalyzed significant societal changes. When I begin to feel crushed by pandemic-induced anxiety, I try to refocus my energy towards what comes next. COVID-19, despite the devastation it’s causing across the globe, presents an opportunity to push for improvement. I’m hopeful we can use the momentum that comes from people finally understanding our vulnerabilities on a more personal level to demand structural transformation.



Sources for information on the Great Epizootic and glanders outbreak:
Kheraj, Sean, “The Great Epizootic of 1872–73: Networks of Animal Disease in North American Urban Environments,” Environmental History, 23, 3 (July 2018): 495–52.
Greene, Ann Norton. Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).