What Hamburg's Missteps In 1892 Cholera Outbreak Can Teach Us About COVID-19 Response

As British scholar Richard Evans researched the history of pandemics for a book more than 30 years ago, he was struck by the uniformity of how governments from different cultures and different historical periods responded.

"Almost every epidemic you can think of, the first reaction of any government is to say, 'No, no, it's not here. We haven't got it,'" he says. "Or 'it's only mild' or 'it's not going to have a big effect.'"

In nearly every case, says Evans, governments that made these assurances turned out to be wrong — sometimes exceptionally so, as he outlined in his 1987 book, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, about that city's outbreak 130 years ago.

As the world comes to terms with how governments have responded to today's coronavirus pandemic, some are looking to history to guide them. Evans is a knighted historian best known for his trilogy of books about the Third Reich, but his study of late-19th-century Hamburg also serves as a guidebook with lessons for political leaders managing today's COVID-19 crisis.