Bill Gates says there are 4 big lessons from the Spanish Flu that we should heed during the coronavirus pandemic

• Bill Gates recommended the book "The Great Influenza" as part of his summer reading list. The book chronicles the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that resulted in 50 million deaths worldwide.
• Gates said he re-read the book for advice on handling the current pandemic, and came away with four key recommendations.
• He said that leadership matters, sugarcoating bad news won't help anyone, and philanthropic efforts are more important now than ever before.
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Bill Gates just released his annual summer reading picks, and this year his list included a pandemic-related book that the Microsoft founder said could offer advice for how to confront the coronavirus pandemic.

The 2004 book, "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry, is an account of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which lasted a year and led to 50 million deaths globally.

Gates said he re-read this book to "refresh my memory about the realities and lessons of that devastating pandemic," and that he had four main takeaways after reading Barry's work.

"I'm glad I read it. It's one of several books that made it clear to me that the world needed to do a better job of preparing for novel pathogens," Gates wrote.

1. Leaders in charge of control efforts can make or break the pandemic's severity

Topping Gates' advice list was the idea that leadership matters.

He said the people who are in charge of getting a pandemic under control can change the entire trajectory of lives lost, and pointed to mayors in various cities during the influenza pandemic as examples.

At the start of the pandemic, the mayor of St. Louis called for the shutdown of public places and banned large public gatherings. By contrast, the mayor of Philadelphia held a large parade for the war effort at the time and in the following days, deaths in the city began to mount.

"Undertakers, themselves sick, were overwhelmed. They had no place to put bodies.... Undertakers' work areas were overflowing, they stacked caskets in halls, in their living quarters," Barry wrote.

2. Sugarcoating bad news will only make the pandemic worse

Gates also took away the advice that leaders and health organizations must provide accurate information to the public, even if that information is bleak.

"In 1918, America's political leaders — even health commissioners — sugarcoated bad news to avoid panicking the public," Gates wrote. "That greatly undermined their authority when citizens saw friends and neighbors dying in great numbers."

3. Philanthropy can save hundreds of thousands of lives

He also highlighted the importance of charitable donations during the pandemic, and said without donations from people like John D. Rockefeller and Johns Hopkins, "things could have been much worse" in 1918. These donors helped create public-health schools and education systems that played a role in the medicine and science fields as we know them today.

"These gifts fundamentally transformed American science and medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries giving the country hundreds of thousands of well-trained professionals to treat those who fell ill from influenza and guide the public-health response," Gates wrote.

4. We still don't have the answers we need to fight a pandemic, so we have to be dynamic and work together

Lastly, Gates said "The Great Influenza" reminded him that pandemics are humbling experiences because they remind people of the fragility of life.

He mentioned how the flu vaccine wasn't available until 1933, long after the pandemic had ended, so healthcare professionals were never able to treat patients with antivirals and vaccines at the time of the 1918 flu.

"This time around, we have many more tools at our disposal for creating effective vaccines and therapeutics. But the science is still slower than any of us would like, and putting an end to this pandemic will require more than just great science," Gates said.

"It will also take a lot of political will, especially encouraging social distancing and making sure that scientific miracles spread as far and wide as the virus itself."