Lessons for the coronavirus from the 1899 Honolulu plague

a post by James C. Mohr for the OUP blog


Public health officials all over the United States – indeed globally – are trying to decide how to deal with the world’s coronavirus pandemic. They know the coronavirus originated in China, and they know they can identify it with certainty. But they do not know what might kill it, and they have no cure for anyone who contracts it. Importantly, they are under intense economic and political pressure to suppress the pandemic, despite the diversity, suspicions, and limited trust of the populations affected.

Few people realise, however, that this is not the first time US health officials have faced a pandemic crisis under almost exactly the same circumstances. In 1899, the world’s third great wave of bubonic plague reached Honolulu. Neither of the world’s first two waves of Black Death had made landfall in the islands, so the situation was both novel and terrifying. Like officials today, health officers in Hawaii knew the disease had come from China, and they could identify it with certainty under microscopes. But they did not know how to kill it, they did not know either how or how rapidly it spread, and they did not know how to cure it. And they too were under intense economic and political pressure; all trade with the islands was suspended under international protocols, and their own local government had panicked.

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coronavirus, COVID-19, bubonic_plague,

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