The 1918 Spanish Flu-The Philadelphia Story | Mysteries of the Microscopic World (Part 2 of 3) Track the mutated form of the 1918 Spanish flu as it reached American shores and killed an estimated 675000 people out of a population of 105 million.
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Pull the plug on interventions too early, said Mark Lurie, an associate professor of epidemiology at Brown University School of Public Health, and all “the isolation that we’ve endured over the last couple of weeks is going to be for nothing.” Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases has said: “You don’t make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline.” Consider the responses of Philadelphia, St. Louis and Denver to the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Philadelphia held its Liberty Loan Parade, packing 100000+ people into downtown. Within days, hospitals were full of sick people and the city lost nearly 12,000 to the illness in just four weeks.
St. Louis decided to clamp down, sheltering in place, resulting in a significantly lower overall death rate.
Denver started out like St. Louis, but got impatient, with officials saying “we’ve got to get back to business.". The city opened back up, the virus peaked again and more people died.
“The question for folks in Salt Lake City and the rest of Utah,” Harris asks, “is which of those three do you want to be?”
At www.deseret.com
