David Brooks of the New York Times reflects writes about pandemics past and what they have told us about ourselves. He cites an historian as saying they "hold up a mirror to society and force us to ask basic questions [like]: Whats our responsibility to one another?" Brooks tells of how one of the puzzling features of the 1918 pandemic was that, "when it was over, people didn't talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to that flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I." Maybe this time we will talk about it, learn something and effect change for the better.

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