Abstract
Estimating the lethal impact of a pandemic on a religious community with significant barriers to outsiders can be exceedingly difficult. Nevertheless, Stein and colleagues (2021) developed an innovative means of arriving at such an estimate for the lethal impact of COVID-19 on the Amish community in 2020 by counting user-generated death reports in the widely circulated Amish periodical The Budget. By comparing monthly averages of reported deaths before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stein and colleagues were able to arrive at a rough estimate of “excess deaths” during the first year of the pandemic. Our research extends the same research method, applying it to the years during and immediately preceding the global influenza pandemic of 1918. Results show similarly robust findings, including three notable “waves” of excess deaths among Amish and conservative Mennonites in the USA in 1918, 1919, and 1920. Such results point to the promise of utilizing religious periodicals like The Budget as a relatively untapped trove of user-generated data on public health outcomes among religious minorities more than a century in the past.
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Funding for this paper was provided by Goshen College’s Maple Scholars program.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and quality checks, data analysis, and the creation of the initial draft of the manuscript were performed by both Daniel Stoltzfus and Daniel Eash-Scott. All authors made edits and contributions to the final version of the manuscript.
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Eash-Scott, D., Stoltzfus, D. & Brenneman, R. “The Graves Cannot Be Dug Fast Enough”: Excess Deaths Among US Amish and Mennonites During the 1918 Flu Pandemic. J Relig Health 63, 652–665 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-023-01899-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-023-01899-0