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December 16 - December 27, 2021
Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years.
In every war in American history so far, disease had killed more soldiers than combat. In
“The great end of life is not knowledge but action.”
Within seventy-two hours after the parade, every single bed in each of the city’s thirty-one hospitals was filled.
Medical care was making little difference anyway. Mary Tullidge, daughter of Dr. George Tullidge, died twenty-four hours after her first symptoms. Alice Wolowitz, a student nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, began her shift in the morning, felt sick, and was dead twelve hours later.
On October 1, the third day after the parade, the epidemic killed more than one hundred people—117—in a single day. That number would double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, sextuple. Soon the daily death toll from influenza alone would exceed the city’s average weekly death toll from all causes—all illnesses,
Nearly two-thirds of the dead were under forty.
Nearly one-quarter of all the patients in his hospital died each day. Starr would go home, and when he returned the next day, he would find that between one-quarter and one-fifth of the patients in the hospital had died, replaced by new ones.
In the American military alone, influenza-related deaths totaled just over the number of Americans killed in combat in Vietnam. One in every sixty-seven soldiers in the army died of influenza and its complications, nearly all of them in a ten-week period
Greater Des Moines Committee, businessmen and professionals who had taken charge during the emergency, included the city attorney who warned publishers—and his warning carried the sting of potential prosecution—“I would recommend that if anything be printed in regard to the disease it be confined to simple preventive measures—something constructive rather than destructive.”
terrible things. Terrible things. In Nome, 176 of 300 Inuits had died. But it would get worse. One doctor visited ten tiny villages and found “three wiped out entirely; others average 85% deaths. . . . Survivors generally children . . . probably 25% this number frozen to death before help
