Recently, the stock market has reached record lows, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average having it’s worst week since the “Black Monday” crash of 1987, almost 40 years ago. We have been seeing crashes like this all over the world, causing people to go into major panic. The coronavirus pandemic has brought the world into chaos and taken the economy with it. But this isn’t the first time something like this has happened.

Rewind the clock all the way back to 1918, in the midst of the flu pandemic that swept the U.S. into similar chaos. Lasting from spring 1918 through summer 1919, the Spanish Flu infected 500 million people – about a third of the world’s population at the time, and the death toll is estimated to have been possibly as high as 50 million. This was a very similar pandemic to the coronavirus, and therefore an easy comparison.

According to a study by MIT, cities that acted more emphatically to limit social and civic interactions had more economic growth following the period of restrictions. 

“Cities that implemented social-distancing and other public health interventions just 10 days earlier than their counterparts saw a 5 percent relative increase in manufacturing employment after the pandemic ended.”

This shows that if the government implements stricter stay-at-home orders, the recent economic loss from the coronavirus might disappear as the economy recovers. We will be able to bounce back, maybe even stronger than before. And using the things we learned from this experience, we might be able to prevent another crash of this size in the future.