The Other Forgotten Pandemic: Canada and the Spanish Flu in 1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 1918-19 pandemic of the Spanish flu, which killed 30 to 50 million people worldwide, has had a profound effect on the way we deal with and react to epidemics. When Canada is faced with an outbreak of the flu, SARS, or any other flu-like disease, the media and the medical community refer to the that pandemic. Although for years historians ignored or downplayed its significance (American historian Alfred Crosby called it the “forgotten pandemic”1), today there are scores of publications about it. What has been left out of the historiography, however, is the return of the Spanish flu in February 1920. This “really forgotten ” pandemic also killed thousands of Canadians and left tens of thousands sick. The Spanish flu return in 1920 has not only been forgotten, but its existence raises questions surrounding the response of the newly-formed Federal Department of Health (created in mid-1919), as, very strangely, there is no record of the epidemic in the Departmental reports of this period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".