President Woodrow Wilson, busy organizing a new world older and America’s place in it, never gave a public speech about the outbreak or offered guidance to those suffering its consequences, even though he was among those who fell ill. No memorials were organized for the victims of the pandemic, no monuments erected in town squares. “It’s not surprising that when the war was over and the flu was gone, people just wanted to get on with their lives.” “It was such a discombobulating time,” said Benjamin Montoya, a history professor at Schreiner University, a small private college in Texas. In the U.S., the women’s suffrage movement was building. The flu also came as World War I was winding down, and as revolutions swept across several countries, including Russia and Mexico. In the U.S., an estimated 650,000 died, a toll so devastating it lowered life expectancy in the nation by 12 years. The 1918-19 pandemic infected about one-third of the world’s population and killed at least 50 million people, hitting those between the ages of 20 and 40 the hardest. A lack of preparedness and an over-abundance of wishful thinking.Īnd a kind of collective amnesia about what happened a century ago. Mixed messages from government leaders and health officials. He and others think there are many reasons for this: The nation’s bitter political and cultural divides. “Today, we actually do know what to do, and we’re not doing it.”
“In 1918, the people fighting the flu pandemic really didn’t know what to do, because they’d had no experience with something like that,” said Joseph Gabriel, a historian of medicine at Florida State University. Why didn’t more cities adopt social-distancing earlier? Why did some open too soon? Why do some people (about 14 percent, according to a recent Gallup poll) refuse to wear masks? Why does the United States, with 4 percent of the world’s population, have 25 percent of the novel coronavirus cases? Why that lesson failed to take hold in America this time is a question academics and public-health experts are exploring in earnest. What happened next may sound familiar to those watching the current COVID-19 pandemic: The number of cases kept rising, eventually sickening about 4,500 more people in San Diego (a city of 75,000 residents then) and killing an additional 350 over the next three months. The council voted instead to make masks optional and ignored pleas to re-consider from the city’s health officer, who said the epidemic here - about 550 cases had been reported, including 20 deaths - could be corralled if everyone covered their faces. They worried citizens would be harassed by overzealous police officers. Others said they would interfere with “the fresh air and sunshine” so crucial to a healthy lifestyle. A half-dozen other cities - Seattle, Denver, Indianapolis, Pasadena, Oakland, Sacramento - soon followed.īut the council here balked.
San Francisco had just adopted such a measure, the first in the country, as the death toll from the so-called Spanish Flu climbed. In October of 1918, with a lethal influenza spreading in San Diego, the health board asked the City Council to pass a law requiring people to wear face masks in public.