In 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson was in the midst of negotiating with his British and French counterparts the treaty to end World War I, he got a violent case of the flu. He does a great job of showing just how profoundly that pandemic affected not just millions of families like mine but also the entire flow of history.īarry speculates that if not for the pandemic, World War II might never have erupted. To refresh my memory about the realities and lessons of that devastating pandemic, I recently reread The Great Influenza (2004), by John M. The best parts of human nature were frequently on display-but so were acts of ignorance, greed, and fear of the “other.” Doctors and nurses were incredibly heroic, putting their own lives at risk and working themselves to the bone. Then as now people isolated themselves at home, streets were empty, and industry shut down. She was living in Bremerton, WA, which suffered big losses from influenza because it had a big Navy shipyard and sailors coming from all over the world. In 1918, my grandmother was 27 and pregnant with my dad’s older sister. The most vulnerable of all were pregnant women. Unlike COVID-19, which is hitting older people the hardest, the influenza pandemic caused the highest mortality among people in their twenties. My dad’s mom, Lillian Gates, was lucky to have survived the 1918 influenza pandemic.
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