Fresno State history professor Ethan Kytle has been reviewing news reports about a pandemic, but not this one. He’s been reading the Fresno Morning Republican. That’s the newspaper that covered the Spanish Flu in 1918. As we experience the COVID-19 pandemic in real time, Kytle has been writing “Dispatches from Fresno,” as a side-by-side comparison of how the city responded to the Spanish Flu.
Credit Courtesy of Ethan Kytle
Listen to the interview above to hear Kytle explain what we can learn from the city’s efforts back then to “flatten the curve.” In addition to his weekly dispatches, Kytle also published an op-ed in the Fresno Bee summarizing conclusions from his research so far.