What, if anything, can we learn from history as we live 'through history'? Victoria has a long past with epidemics and pandemics, from epidemics of smallpox and other diseases through the nineteenth century, the 'Russian flu' (1890), 'Spanish flu' (1919) and 'Asian flu' (1957) pandemics, polio (1937–38) and HIV/AIDS (1980s to today) crises, and the 2009 'Swine flu' pandemic.
The impulse in such circumstances is to search for historical analogies to help comprehend the scale, costs and challenges of the present crisis: the Spanish flu, the Great Depression, the Second World War? As was remarked more than once during the Victorian Parliament's emergency sitting on 23 April 2020, 'right now we are living through history'.
In Victoria, as around the world, COVID-19-the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 -has caused the most remarkable interruption to daily life in living memory, if not modern history.
