A Rush to Re-Open the Economy Would Cause Death

I am a historian of pandemics. Like an accountant preparing his clientele’s income taxes, you might say, “This is my busy season!”  

From 2005 to 2007, I led a group of historians at the University of Michigan, who worked with epidemiologists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to study the use of social distancing measures during the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. That pandemic still holds the record as the worst contagious crisis in human history. It killed about 40 million lives worldwide, including up to 550,000 Americans.