A Unique Pestilence

A most alarming difference was the suddenness with which this flu struck. How sudden? In the recent book The Great Influenza, author John M. Barry quotes a written record of this experience: “In Rio de Janeiro, a man asked medical student Ciro Viera Da Cunha, who was waiting for a streetcar, for information in a perfectly normal voice, then fell down, dead; in Cape Town, South Africa, Charles Lewis boarded a streetcar for a three-mile trip home when the conductor collapsed, dead. In the next three miles six people aboard the streetcar died, including the driver.” All died of the flu.

There was also fear because the flu struck indiscriminately. For reasons still not clear, the 1919 pandemic did not primarily afflict the elderly; it struck healthy young people and killed them. The majority of those who died of the Spanish flu were between 20 and 40 years of age.

Moreover, it was truly a worldwide epidemic. It even reached tropical islands. Influenza was introduced into Western Samoa (now known as Samoa) by ship on November 7, 1918, and within two months about 20 percent of the population of 38,302 died. Every major country of the world was dramatically affected!

Also, there was the enormity of this scourge. For example, the disease hit early and especially hard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. By mid-October 1918, there was a serious shortage of coffins. “One manufacturer said he could dispose of 5,000 caskets in two hours, if he had them. At times the city morgue had as many as ten times as many bodies as coffins,” says historian Alfred W. Crosby.

In a relatively short time, the flu had killed more people than any other pandemic of its kind in human history. A common estimate of worldwide deaths was 21 million, but some experts now judge that figure to be low. Some epidemiologists today suggest that a more likely toll is 50 million deaths or perhaps as many as 100 million! Notes Barry, mentioned earlier: “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.”

Incredibly, the Spanish flu killed more Americans in about a year than died in battle in both world wars combined. Author Gina Kolata explains: “If such a plague came today, killing a similar fraction of the U.S. population, 1.5 million Americans would die, which is more than the number felled in a single year by heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS, and Alzheimer’s disease combined.”