🎧 Dan Snow on Covid History (and Cummings)

Episode summary: David and Helen talk to the historian Dan Snow about the parallels for the current crisis. Is it like past pandemics or is it more like a war? What has it exposed about the weak spots in our societies? And what have we learned about the role of political leadership? Plus we explore the value of Churchill comparisons on the 80th anniversary of his great WWII speeches and we dip our toes into the Cummings affair. Talking Points: Lockdown, quarantine, social distancing have been borrowed from the past. - This is not as great a mortality or morbidity event as past pandemics, at least yet. - But we are not as separate from past human experience as many people would like to believe. Perhaps the better comparisons are the forgotten ones: 1957 and 1968. - The other main comparison is the Spanish flu, which was far more lethal. - Politicians treated these past flus as background events. This crisis is all consuming. - Most people in 1919 died at home. Health infrastructure changes the conversation. - The politics of…