In an effort to maintain a sense of historical perspective about our current dilemma, I'm reading The Great Influenza by John M. Barry. It's a detailed history of the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic, and it's terrifying.While COVID-19 is widespread, serious and deadly enough, it does not approach the ferocity of the "Spanish Flu" pandemic of a century ago. It was wartime, and unsuspecting infected troops were being shipped all over the country and the world, spreading the virus with lightning speed. The graphic descriptions of the sudden onset of violent symptoms, the terrible damage done to the human body within hours, and the quick and tormented deaths of the victims in massive numbers are the stuff of real-life horror.
Equally grisly is the recounting of dead bodies mounting up in streets and homes. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this problem was especially acute. Against the advice of medical experts, a scheduled parade was allowed to proceed. The throngs of unsuspecting marchers and attendees spread the virus throughout the city at an astronomical rate. Patients were dying too quickly, and too many others in the infrastructure of sickness and death--medical staff, first responders, undertakers, gravediggers--were also falling ill and dying fast. There was no one left to process the dead; if there were, they were afraid to go near any place of what was often called "plague".
Pinpointing an exact death toll for the Spanish Flu is impossible, but it's generally estimated that 500 million people--one-third of the world's population at the time--were infected, and 50 million people died worldwide, including 675,000 Americans. These are staggering numbers in any era.
Reading The Great Influenza makes hand-washing seem life saving (it is), stay-at-home quarantines more bearable, and "social distancing" more sensible. I thought it would take me months to read this book, but after ten days I'm more than halfway through it. It's frustrating to see the many avoidable errors made that allowed the virus to spread so far, so fast. Yet it's good to know we've learned so much since the last century's pandemic. As the numbers show, we're lucky to be alive and fighting the flu in our own modern time.
