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TAP TIMES -4- MAY-JUNE 2022

In the time of COVID (from 3)

industry to increase 3.3 percent in 2020,
accelerating to 6.2 percent in 2021. That
would mean, reported WSTS, sales of
$426 billion in 2020.

“It will go away”

On March 11,
2020, the same
day WHO recog-
nized COVID-19
as a pandemic,
Pres. Donald
J. Trump was Karl Benz, founder of the German company that became Mer-
asked about the cedes-Benz, is generally considered the inventor of the first prac-
economy under tical automobile. Benz’ invention preceded the Spanish flu by
three decades.
COVID.
The first practical automobile patent had
‘“It will go away,” been registered in Germany in 1885 by
he told report- Karl Friedrich Benz. In the U.S., in 1908,
ers. “Just stay Henry Ford unveiled his Model T and Wil-
calm. It will go Passengers wait to board a trolley liam Durant founded General Motors —
in the Greenlake District of Seattle,
away.” Wash. during the Spanish flu out- just 10 years before flu pandemic.
break of 1918-1920. The name of
the disease appears to have been a
Now, more than misnomer and the origin was later No vaccines, no work-from-home
two years after traced to Kansas City. When the Spanish flu (H1N1 virus) struck
Trump’s optimistic assessment, COVID-19 in the spring of 1918, there was no vac-
is still with us leaving more than 984,343 cine; nor did industry have any knowledge
deaths in the U.S. (April 24, 2022) and of how to control the pandemic, other than
millions more worldwide. to keep workers isolated.

COVID-19 beat Spanish flu Working from home in an age before com-
To date, COVID-19 has far eclipsed the puters was not an option. Workers carried
Spanish flu in the death count. Observers on at their work locations wearing masks
say the Spanish flu killed 675,000 in the as the virus spread around the world.
U.S. — and there was no vaccine. Masks
and isolation were the only preventation. Ultimately the death toll was measured
at 50 million and one-third of the world’s
There was, of course, no semiconductor population became infected.
industry at the time of the Spanish flu;
the U.S. was transitioning from a largely Combatting a killer
agrarian economy to an industrial one. COVID, on the other hand, introduced a
plethora of new terms and new ways to
In the time of the Spanish flu, even the combat the killer disease with its many
automobile industry was in its earliest, mutations.
formative years.
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