Influenza 1918, American Experience, watch the full episode

[littlemissmartypants]

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/influenza/#part01


AIRED JANUARY 2, 2018
Influenza 1918
Film Description
In September of 1918, soldiers at an army base near Boston suddenly began to die. The cause of death was identified as influenza, but it was unlike any strain ever seen.?As the killer virus spread across the country, hospitals overfilled, death carts roamed the streets and helpless city officials dug mass graves. It was the worst epidemic in American history, killing over 600,000 — until it disappeared as mysteriously as it had begun.

Article:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/1918-influenza-pandemic-and-covid-19/

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and COVID-19
Much has changed since the influenza pandemic of 1918, yet our responses to COVID-19 must still rely on many of the century-old lessons.
March 18, 2020 | Matthew Boyce and Rebecca Katz

The source of the influenza illness remained a mystery to scientists as viruses were too small and obscure for the optical microscopes available in 1918. Credit: Naval Historical Society

Much more at the links.

❤ lmsp

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~George Santayana

[zanana1]

1. The effect of the 1918 flu epidemic is comparable to the Covid19 pandemic.

In the beginning nobody knew what it was. It was aerosolized and spread when large groups of people gathered. It killed many of the people who got it and they died of
"pneumonia". It was a virus that attacked the lungs. Eventually, people started wearing masks but they were so porous they didn't help. Eventually, "herd immunity"killed the virus.