(CNN)At this point in the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 32 million infected and more than 980,000 dead worldwide, describing this time as "unprecedented" may sound like nails on a chalkboard.
This pandemic, however, actually isn't without precedent: The last time we dealt with a pandemic so mysterious, uncontained and far-reaching was in 1918, when influenza devastated populations around the globe.
1918: Nurses care for victims of an influenza epidemic outdoors amid canvas tents in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
The 1918 flu killed 50 million to 100 million people through 1919. There are eerie parallels between the 1918 flu and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic: a disease with a startling range of symptoms for which there is little treatment, human behavior as a hindrance to public health and cluster outbreaks that have become widespread, to name a few.
For 102 years, influenza scholars and infectious disease experts have attempted to educate the masses in hopes of preventing future pandemics. And yet, here we are.
To be clear, the coronavirus at fault for the current pandemic isn't a flu virus. And yet the 1918 and 2020 pandemics share similarities in terms of their basis on a novel, formidable virus that took the world and every aspect of society by storm. To learn the lessons of the 1918 flu, the missteps we've taken since and our post-pandemic future, CNN spoke with three experts on the subject.
They are John M. Barry, author of "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History"; Dr. Jeremy Brown, an emergency care physician and author of "Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History"; and Gina Kolata, a science and medicine reporter with The New York Times and author of "Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It."
These conversations have been edited and condensed for clarity.
CNN: What are the lessons of the 1918 pandemic?
John M. Barry: Number one, tell the truth. Number two, nonpharmaceutical interventions work. The Asian countrie