The incubation period of influenza is two to three days. In truth, nurses had no impact because none were available: Out of 3, urgent requests for nurses submitted to one dispatcher, only were provided. There was plenty of cause. At its worst, the epidemic in Philadelphia would kill people Priests drove horse-drawn carts down city streets, calling upon residents to bring out their dead; many were buried in mass graves. More than 12, Philadelphians died— nearly all of them in six weeks.
Across the country, public officials were lying. Over a four-day period in October, the hospital at Camp Pike admitted 8, soldiers. There is only death and destruction. People knew this was not the same old thing, though. They knew because the numbers were staggering—in San Antonio, 53 percent of the population got sick with influenza. They knew because victims could die within hours of the first symptoms—horrific symptoms, not just aches and cyanosis but also a foamy blood coughed up from the lungs, and bleeding from the nose, ears and even eyes.
And people knew because towns and cities ran out of coffins. People could believe nothing they were being told, so they feared everything, particularly the unknown.
How long would it last? How many would it kill? Who would it kill? With the truth buried, morale collapsed. Society itself began to disintegrate. In most disasters, people come together, help each other, as we saw recently with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. But in , without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people looked after only themselves. The Bureau of Child Hygiene begged people to take in—just temporarily—children whose parents were dying or dead; few replied.
These people are almost all at the point of death. Nothing seems to rouse them now There are families in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high and they still hold back. She came and tapped on the window, but refused to talk to me until she had gotten a safe distance away.
Nobody was coming in, nobody would bring food in, nobody came to visit. You were afraid even to go out The fear was so great people were actually afraid to leave their homes You had no school life, you had no church life, you had nothing It completely destroyed all family and community life Fear emptied places of employment, emptied cities.
Shipbuilding workers throughout the Northeast were told they were as important to the war effort as soldiers at the front. Yet at the L. Shattuck Co. Gilchrist yard only 45 percent did; at Freeport Shipbuilding only 43 percent; at Groton Iron Works, 41 percent.
Fear emptied the streets, too. One night, driving the 12 miles home, he saw not a single car. It was really a city of the dead. Then, as suddenly as it came, influenza seemed to disappear.
It had burned through the available fuel in a given community. An undercurrent of unease remained, but aided by the euphoria accompanying the end of the war, traffic returned to streets, schools and businesses reopened, society returned to normal.
A third wave followed in January , ending in the spring. This was lethal by any standard except the second wave, and one particular case would have an exceptional impact on history. His sudden weakness and severe confusion halfway through that conference—widely commented upon—very possibly contributed to his abandoning his principles. The result was the disastrous peace treaty, which would later contribute to the start of World War II. In fact, he had a degree temperature, intense coughing fits, diarrhea and other serious symptoms.
A stroke explains none of the symptoms. Influenza, which was then widespread in Paris and killed a young aide to Wilson, explains all of them—including his confusion.
Experts would later agree that many patients afflicted by the pandemic influenza had cognitive or psychological symptoms. After that third wave, the virus did not go away, but it did lose its extraordinary lethality, partly because many human immune systems now recognized it and partly because it lost the ability to easily invade the lungs. No longer a bloodthirsty murderer, it evolved into a seasonal influenza.
Scientists and other experts are still asking questions about the virus and the devastation it caused, including why the second wave was so much more lethal than the first. Another question concerns who died. Even though the death toll was historic, most people who were infected by the pandemic virus survived; in the developed world, the overall mortality was about 2 percent.
In the less developed world, mortality was worse. Two days later, the city shut down most public gatherings and quarantined victims in their homes. The cases slowed. By the end of the pandemic, between 50 and million people were dead worldwide, including more than , Americans—but the death rate in St. Louis was less than half of the rate in Philadelphia. The deaths due to the virus were estimated to be about people per , in St Louis, compared to per , in Philadelphia during the first six months—the deadliest period—of the pandemic.
Dramatic demographic shifts in the past century have made containing a pandemic increasingly hard. Now as then, public health interventions are the first line of defense against an epidemic in the absence of a vaccine. These measures include closing schools, shops, and restaurants; placing restrictions on transportation; mandating social distancing, and banning public gatherings. This is how small groups can save lives during a pandemic.
Of course, getting citizens to comply with such orders is another story: In , a San Francisco health officer shot three people when one refused to wear a mandatory face mask. But eventually, the most drastic and sweeping measures paid off. After implementing a multitude of strict closures and controls on public gatherings, St. Louis, San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Kansas City responded fastest and most effectively: Interventions there were credited with cutting transmission rates by 30 to 50 percent.
New York City, which reacted earliest to the crisis with mandatory quarantines and staggered business hours, experienced the lowest death rate on the Eastern seaboard. The influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history.
It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. Although there is not universal consensus regarding where the virus originated, it spread worldwide during In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in spring The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about , occurring in the United States.
Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, years old, and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic. While the H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated , the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood.
With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.
The H1N1 flu virus caused the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century. To better understand this deadly virus, an expert group of researchers and virus hunters set out to search for the lost virus, sequence its genome, recreate the virus in a highly safe and regulated laboratory setting at CDC, and ultimately study its secrets to better prepare for future pandemics.
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