Influence of the Cold War upon Influenza Pandemic of 1957-1958

TL;DR

This paper models the 1957-1958 influenza pandemic considering Cold War restrictions, revealing that international relationships significantly influenced the pandemic's spread and impact across countries.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid SEIR-network model to analyze how Cold War restrictions affected the global spread of the pandemic.

Findings

Cold War restrictions influenced pandemic spread between countries.

Reduced Cold War effects could have increased Western casualties.

International relationships significantly impacted pandemic dynamics.

Abstract

Influenza Pandemic of 1957-1958, also called Asian Flu Pandemic, was one of the most widespread pandemics in history. In this paper, we model the pandemic, considering the effect of the Cold War. There were some restrictions between Western and Eastern nations due to the Cold War during the pandemic. We expect that such restrictions influenced the spread of the pandemic. We propose a hybrid model to determine how the pandemic spread through the world. The model combines the SEIR-based model for local areas and the network model for global connection between countries. First, we reproduce the situation in 19 countries. Then, we run another experiment to find the influence of the war in the spread of the pandemic; simulation considering international relationships in different years. The simulation results show that the impact of the pandemic in each country was much influenced by international relationships. This study indicates that if there was less effect of the Cold War, Western nations would have larger number of death cases, Eastern nations would have smaller number of death cases, and the world impact would be increased somewhat.