The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

by John M. Barry

New York City was panicking, terrified. Copeland tried to reassure the public by announcing a strict quarantine, though no quarantine was actually implemented. There were literally hundreds of thousands of people sick simultaneously, many of them desperately sick. The death toll ultimately reached thirty-three thousand for New York City alone, and that understated the number considerably, since statisticians later arbitrarily stopped counting people as victims of the epidemic even though people were still dying of the disease at epidemic rates—still dying months later at rates higher than anywhere else in the country. It was impossible to get a doctor, and perhaps more impossible to get a nurse. Reports came in that nurses were being held by force in the homes of patients too frightened and desperate to allow them to leave. Nurses were literally being kidnapped. It did not seem possible to put more pressure on the laboratory. Yet more pressure came.

1918 Influenza