2020 Hometown Heroes

2020 Hometown HEROES Magazine LINCOLN DAILY NEWS May 14, 2020 Page 179 President of the United States right down to the Lincoln City Treasurer are predicting that we will see a similar bounce back once this disease is under control. The differences between the two pandemics From a journalistic viewpoint, the biggest difference in the two pandemics is the transmission of information. Donath writes in his synopsis that it was difficult to determine the accuracy of the Logan County death counts during the Spanish Flu because there was a lack of records. He gleaned most of his information from newspaper accounts, death records, and the Lincoln City Health Department and notes that information from outside the city was harder to find. At that time there was NO county health department, and no central location for collecting data. We know that today the Logan County Department of Public Health is playing a big part in tracking with Covid-19 through our community. The dashboard that they have available online is updated each day and is accessible to anyone. In addition, the LCDPH is partnering with Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital to put out to local press offices a daily report of the Covid tests being performed, their results and the number of people infected and if any are hospitalized. To date the reports have registered great big goose eggs in the category of local lives lost. Today we watch our Governor and our President on television as they offer up daily reports. There was no television in 1918. The television didn’t come to be until 1927. However, there was radio, so people could stay informed that way as well as by newspaper. However, the World War had come to an end in 1918, and President Woodrow Wilson was reported to be much more interested in dealing with war’s ending than the Spanish Flu. Though it was later announced that the President himself contracted the flu and survived it, he refused to acknowledge it as a serious problem in the United States. In March 2020, an article published in The News Republic - How America’s Newspapers Covered Up a Pandemic - The terrifying, censored coverage of the 1918 Spanish flu by Walter Shapiro summed up the Presidential reaction to the disease. “In October 1918 alone, 195,000 Americans died from the virus. Yet President Woodrow Wilson, obsessed with a war in Europe that would end on November 11, made no public references to the disease. And states received no assistance from Washington, not even from the Food and Drug Administration.” In stark contrast, our federal government and our state government have both been highly visible during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Regardless of whether you support our Republican President Donald Trump or our Democrat Governor J.B. Pritzker, no one should be able to deny that both of those CONTINUED u