During the Spanish Flu, Some Cities Relaxed Their Social Distancing Measures

And more people unnecessarily died.

Photo by Tai's Captures on Unsplash

Sometimes, does it seem like we’re taking this whole social distancing thing too seriously?

The concept of social distancing has proven to be effective based on history. As a century-old practice from the 1918 Spanish flu, social distancing during a pandemic led to significantly lower death rates. The concept refers to preventing sick people from coming in contact with healthy people and reducing disease transmission, and canceling events and gatherings of large groups of people.

Social distancing does not stop the outbreak of a disease, but it slows it. It is a means of reducing the exposure of a pandemic to not overburden the health care system and reduce the exposure of at risk populations. By reducing exposure of at risk populations like the elderly and those with compromised immune systems and keeping the workload of the health care system manageable, there will be significantly less deaths from a pandemic.

Now, we are taking a lesson from history as we are faced with another global pandemic in the Coronavirus. Social distancing measures were placed by the local governments of many cities as they saw their first Coronavirus cases. The Spanish flu was the deadliest pandemic in…