1918 Spanish Flu historical documentary | Swine Flu Pandemic | Deadly plague of 1918

This was the Spanish flu of

1918

, the deadliest

pandemic

of the 20th century. Epidemics have infected societies throughout history. Epidemics usually come and go, but some really stand out for their cruelty. In recent history there has been no

pandemic

more devastating than the

1918

flu. Sometimes called the Spanish flu or

swine

flu, it killed about 675,000 people in the United States alone. The outbreak occurred in the middle of World War I and the flu would actually kill more troops than combat. The 1918 flu was so

deadly

that it killed more Americans than World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

However, the Spanish flu was horrible for even more reasons. It was highly contagious and killed extremely quickly, sometimes in as little as 12 hours. He killed people in the prime of their lives, but most of the victims were healthy young people between 20 and 40 years old. Additionally, it killed some of its victims in strange and brutal ways, completely different from a typical flu virus. In fact, some symptoms closely resembled the

plague

s that killed millions of people in the Middle Ages. But scientists analyzed the pathogen's genome and verified that it wasn't the Black Death that killed millions of people in 1918.

It was just the flu. This video will cover how the flu started and spread around the world, the strange symptoms that made it so

deadly

, and how the flu brought society to the brink of collapse. If the epidemic continues its mathematical pace of acceleration, civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth within a few weeks Victor Vaughn, Surgeon General of the Army, October 1918. No one can be absolutely sure where the pandemic originated, but There are several theories. . In northern France in 1917 there was an outbreak of a flu-like illness at a British military base. The base was located in a swampy area with many waterfowl and pigs.

New flu epidemics often arise when people have close contact with sick birds or pigs. There was a separate outbreak of respiratory illnesses among Southeast Asian soldiers fighting in World War I between 1916 and 1918. Most flus begin in Southeast Asia and some historians argue that soldiers may have brought a new virus to Europe. , but historian John Berry believes in his fascinating book "The Great Influenza," that the flu may have originated on a farm in rural Kansas by jumping from infected pigs to humans. In fact, the first officially recognized cases of Spanish flu emerged at a military base in Kansas.

The United States had just entered World War I and training and industry had increased at a rapid pace as the war machine was put into motion, but in rural Haskell County, Kansas, a war of another kind was quietly beginning. guy. Haskell County was in the midst of a deadly outbreak of what appeared to be a mysterious new disease. Most community farmers may have contracted the new disease when a pathogen from sick pigs jumped species and began infecting humans. The new virus,

swine

flu, was surprisingly contagious and extremely deadly. A local doctor was terrified by the death toll from the new virus and contacted the US Public Health Service for advice.

His concern was noted but nothing further was done. After all, it was a small rural backwater. How could it spread so far in such a sparsely populated area? Little by little the virus began to die out as they ran out of new people to infect. Perhaps it would have stopped there if times had been different, but 1918 was the perfect breeding ground for a global pandemic. At the beginning of 1918, all the military bases were filled with young men training for war. The military rushed to build new barracks, hospitals, training areas and facilities to support the influx of hundreds of thousands of men.

Some of these men were volunteers and others had been recruited. The strange new disease was disappearing in Haskell County when some young men left the place and headed to Camp Funston, Kansas, to train. Camp Funston, located at what is now Fort Riley, was already overcapacity, with 56,000 young men training for war. There had not been time to build enough barracks for all of them. It was the coldest winter ever recorded east of the Rocky Mountains, but many men slept in unheated tents with only thin blankets. In an effort to keep them all warm, the commander ordered all the men to move into the barracks, violating health and safety rules that dictated how much space each soldier should have.

Inside the barracks, men huddled around stoves trying to keep warm. The Haskell County men must have approached too, even as they began coughing and sneezing. That's all it took. In the overcrowded barracks, the flu spread rapidly. It only took six days for the outbreak to begin. The Haskell County men arrived on February 28. Less than a week later, men began flocking to doctor's appointments. In just a few weeks, the flu swept through the base, sickening thousands and killing between 38 and 50 people. It was a high mortality rate for the flu, but it was nothing compared to what would come next.

The virus was about to mutate and get much worse. Flu viruses are constantly mutating and sometimes there will be a really big change or a virus that usually affects only animals mutates so that it can infect people as well. When that happens, it can be very deadly. The flu comes in waves. That's why we have a flu season. Although it may seem like a bad flu is over, the flu can hide for a while or go infect people in another part of the world and then come back even worse. In the case of the 1918 flu, three waves of flu devastated the world.

The first wave wasn't that bad, but the second and third waves were extremely dangerous. The outbreak at Camp Funston occurred right at the end of the flu season in the United States, so the first wave infected many people, but then it disappeared. The military was not worried. At the time they were dealing with the much more deadly measles outbreak. The flu virus seemed to fade away, but in reality it simply went abroad to face a world at war. "He came to the camp when the day was wet, cold, and cold with his hand wet, bony, and bold; and his breath was cold, musty, and damp, and he killed so quickly and so eagerly that he carried off everyone's men. company rank." The Flu, Private Josh Lee, 1919.

Almost all of the ships carrying American troops to the war arrived at the port of Brest, France. In April 1918, just as the flu outbreak was subsiding at Camp Funston, an epidemic began in Brest and slowly began to spread throughout northern France. Even though the disease was spreading in the city, more and more troops arrived. Healthy men disembarked, became infected, and then embarked to new duty stations and to the front carrying the disease through every small town and village the armies traveled through. The flu swept through France and followed the front lines to Belgium and the Netherlands.

It jumped the war lines and began to infect the German army, actually affecting the results of the battle, as there were so many troops who were too sick to fight. He jumped from the German army to the German people. In May he had arrived in Italy, where he crossed the Mediterranean and advanced towards North Africa. He also arrived in England in May returning on ships with troops heading home. Infection and mortality rates began to skyrocket in Spain and Portugal. The flu got its name, Spanish flu, from the early infection and high mortality rate in Spain, where eight million were reported to have died in May.

Spain was neutral in World War I and, as a result, was one of the only countries that reported the news without strict government censorship. Most countries did not want to reveal to their enemies that they were fighting an epidemic and did not want to affect the morale of their people, so the government pressured the media to conceal and downplay the severity of the virus. However, in neutral Spain the press was free to report the news accurately. Newspaper headlines in Spain spoke loudly of an epidemic that was killing millions of people, while other countries only spoke quietly of the flu.

The world believed that the flu was worse than Spain when in reality Spain was the only one who talked about it at the beginning. The flu continued to spread beyond Western Europe. In July he had jumped to Scandinavia and Greece. The same month, the flu made its way into a tense Russia where the tsar and his family had just been executed and the Bolsheviks were fighting with other factions to see who would control Russia's future. A ship full of sick sailors arrived in Mumbai, India, at the end of May. At first some dock workers called in sick, then the workers on the nearest docks got sick, and then the men in the nearby warehouses got sick, and so on all the way to the city.

Ships left those same infested docks and spread to other ports in Asia. The sick boarded trains in Mumbai and spread the disease like wildfire along railway lines to the subcontinent and mainland Asia. The flu appeared in China around the same time, spreading inland from a dock in Shanghai. By June, it had arrived in Singapore, a global trade center where the flu infected dock workers and spread to the local population from the bustling docks. Sailors carried the flu south to Indonesia and north to Malaysia and Thailand, where it continued to spread. In July, it had arrived in sub-Saharan Africa with infected sailors arriving at ports.

It entered West Africa from ships arriving at Freetown, Sierra Leone. It infected East Africa through the port of Mombasa, Kenya. Ships arriving in Cape Town release the virus into South Africa. From these ports, the flu made its way across the continent, devastating the population. In July it also arrived in Peru and began to spread throughout South America. By August he had returned to North America. In October it had arrived in New Zealand and Japan. By November, a deadly outbreak was emerging in Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. Despite quarantines imposed on ships entering ports, restrictions on docks, and a concerted effort to contain it, it finally spread to Australia in 1919.

Within a year, the deadly flu had spread around the world. . The flu was able to spread so efficiently for many reasons, including the movement of large companies of troops around the world and the conditions in which those troops lived. World War I was desperately brutal and trench warfare led to horrible living conditions and perfect reproduction. ground for disease. Men lived outdoors without protection from the freezing winter, pouring rain, or sweltering sun. Troops on the front lines lived in dirty trenches for months, where they had to eat, sleep and respond to all the calls of nature in close contact with each other.

When it rained, the trenches filled with water that became fetid and dirty because it had nowhere to drain. Men's feet rotted inside their boots, a condition called trench foot. The corpses lay decomposing in a no man's land between the two armies. When it rained, the water washed excrement, decomposing body parts, and dirt into the trenches where the men lived. The constant bombardment lifted the earth and turned the ground into a neglected swamp. The mud became so thick that in some places it looked like quicksand. Boards were placed for the men to walk on. There were cases of horses, pack mules and even soldiers slipping from catwalks and drowning in the mud before they could remove their heavy equipment.

By the end of the war, more than 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians would have died, so it is not surprising that when a violent new virus arrived it became an even deadlier enemy than enemy soldiers. Sometime in the summer of 1918, the flu mutated to become more deadly. For some people it caused the normal symptoms of fever, chills, nausea, aches and diarrhea and many became ill and then recovered like a normal flu. Some were sick longer or died after contracting secondary infections such as pneumonia. However, many people became seriously ill with strange symptoms. In fact, in the July 1918 issue of the medical journal "The Lancet," doctors argued that this strange epidemic could not be the flu because the symptoms did not match.

Italian doctors argued the same. In some people, the Spanish flu caused fevers as high asthat people had hallucinations. Some writhed in agonizing muscle pain so intense that doctors thought they had dengue, also called "bone-breaking fever." It left some people temporarily or even permanently blind, deaf or paralyzed. Some lost the ability to smell. Some had severe vertigo and fell if they tried to walk. The extreme ear infections developed very quickly, from the first pain to ruptured eardrums in just a few hours. Some had terrible headaches and double vision. The intense mucous excretions and inflammation made it difficult for the victims to breathe, some people coughed so hard that they tore their abdominal muscles.

Doctors performing autopsies saw lungs so damaged that they resembled those of people who died from poisonous gases in war. Some people developed a symptom that most doctors had never seen before. Small puffs of air came out of the tears in the lungs and became trapped under the skin, swelling into small sacs all over the body. When they moved, the pockets crunched like a bowl of crispy rice, according to one nurse. Some people developed hemorrhagic fever, which, like Ebola, causes its victims to bleed. An Army report described the flu as a rapidly increasing, blood-choking lung infection, fatal within 24 to 48 hours.

Some people were bleeding from their noses, ears and eyes. Some people with the 1918 flu suffered such a lack of oxygen that they began to turn blue or even look black, a condition called cyanosis. People reportedly became so dark that it was difficult to distinguish whites from coloreds. For this reason the flu was nicknamed "the blue death" and many wondered if the Black Death had returned. When people started turning blue, doctors knew they wouldn't survive more than a few hours. The flu was also terrifying because it could kill very quickly. Many victims died one, two or even hours after showing their first symptoms.

According to a story told in the book "The Great Influenza," a man in Cape Town, South Africa, boarded a tram just as a driver died. During the three-mile trip to his house, six more people died on the streetcar. When the driver died, the man got off the tram and walked to his house. "We've had several cases where people were perfectly healthy and died within 12 hours." Charles Edward Winslow, epidemiologist and professor at Yale University. In the late summer of 1918, the flu virus returned to the United States, but this time it was much more deadly. In August, a shipload of sick people arrived in New York City from Europe.

Four men had already died at sea and 200 more people aboard the ship were sick. Many were taken to hospitals but were not quarantined. The following week several more ships arrived full of sick people. The same thing was happening in other deepwater ports such as Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans. At the same time that the virus arrived and spread in the ports, ships were leaving those same ports bound for Canada, Central America, the Caribbean and South America, transporting infected people. In early September there was an outbreak at Boston's Navy Pier. The dock was quarantined, but officers still moved between bases.

An officer was probably responsible for bringing the flu to nearby Camp Devens. At first only a few men declared themselves ill, and within a few days an epidemic broke out. By mid-September, thousands of men were sick, in many cases violently. Of those who were sick, seventy-five percent were so sick that they had to be hospitalized. The large number of patients overwhelmed the medical staff at the military hospital. The hospital had been designed to treat a maximum of 1,200 soldiers at a time, but there were more than 6,000 patients crammed together. There were cots piled up in every available space, in hallways and offices, even on outdoor porches.

Doctors and nurses fell ill and there simply were not enough healthy people to care for the thousands of sick people. So many died that they could not all fit in the hospital morgue. The dead were piled on top of each other like firewood in the hallway outside the morgue. Every day they took them away and every day the room filled up again. Army medical officers issued an order that no men be sent into or out of Camp Devens. However that is not what happened. A group of officers left Camp Devens and headed to Camp Grant in Illinois.

Despite regulations prohibiting it, the army chief had authorized overcrowding due to a shortage of barracks, again creating the ideal environment for the spread of the disease. Shortly after arriving, Devens camp officers fell ill. The men were quarantined but it was too late. Two days after the first cases, the flu had spread throughout the countryside. Four days after the first case, the men began to die. After five days, the doctors and nurses became ill and began to die. Within six days there were 4,000 men admitted to the hospital and they converted ten barracks into temporary hospitals. Within seven days they were running out of medicines, disinfectants and other medical supplies.

Within nine days they converted nine more barracks to serve as hospitals, bringing the number to twenty. They did not have enough sheets or ambulances to transport all the sick. When they ran out of beds, soldiers were ordered to fill sacks with straw to use as mattresses for the sick. They still didn't have enough. They tried to make enough cloth to cover people's mouths and combat the spread of germs, but they ran out of cloth. The Red Cross set up a station to notify family members that their loved ones were dying or dead. Now the family members were caught in the middle of a deadly epidemic.

Healthy relatives were escorted by coughing service members to identify bodies at the morgue. They crowded into crowded hospitals to visit their loved ones. Desperate parents and wives tried to bribe nurses and orderlies to provide special care for their soldiers. The problem became such that the boss warned about accepting bribes. Those family members would leave the countryside and carry the infection to the civilian community, to local cities, to trains crossing the country, and ultimately back to their own places of origin. Civilian health officials called for an emergency quarantine at Camp Grant, but the virus had already disappeared.

Four days after the first reported case, a trainload of troops had left Camp Grant to cross the countryside to Camp Hancock, near Augusta, Georgia. During the nearly 1,000-mile journey, the men were crammed into poorly ventilated train cars. In the confined spaces, men coughed and had fevers. They infected each other quickly and the virus spread throughout the train. The train stopped repeatedly throughout the journey to refuel and the men who could still walk got off the train to take a break from the dry coughs of the sick and delirious men. There they interacted with railroad workers and curious locals who had come to see the troops.

They infected city after city for nearly 1,000 miles. When they finally arrived in Georgia, 2,000 of the 3,000 men were so sick that they needed to be hospitalized immediately. They started a new outbreak at Camp Hancock. Historians do not know how many men on the train died, but a report from Fort Leonard Wood claims 10%. However, when hundreds began to die, the hospital's medical staff stopped keeping careful records. They were too overwhelmed by all the dead. "A robust person showed the first symptoms at 4:00 p.m. and died at 10:00 a.m." The Journal of the American Medical Association. The same would happen at bases across the United States.

At Camp Custer, Michigan, 2,800 soldiers called in sick in a single day. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of troops were still embarking for Europe. At the time, the government knew how dangerous the flu was, so it tried to contain the virus on ships. Visibly ill men were not allowed on the ships, but in the end this did not make much difference. The flu virus incubates for a few days before signs of infection are visible. Aboard ships, men remained locked in their bunks for most of the journey across the sea. Armed military police enforced segregation. On most ships, about 400 men were packed into each cramped bunk room in cramped, poorly ventilated quarters.

Although the troops were separated from others on the ship, they still shared the same mess hall where everyone ate. They would pass by breathing the same air and touching the same tables and chairs as the previous group. On a ship called "Leviathan", the flu broke out almost immediately despite quarantine efforts. In two days it had overwhelmed the ship's medical services. Doctors and nurses lay sick next to their delirious patients, coughing and blood pouring from their bodies. Blood pooled on the floor and nurses who were still well enough to work walked through the puddles leaving bloody footprints on the deck.

Finally there were so many sick people that they began to lay them on the deck of the ship in the open. They even stayed there during storms because the well was too full to move them and the sick were too sick to move themselves. At first, the deaths occurred sparsely and the officers made careful notes in the Leviathan's captain's logbook. At first, they wrote down the date and time of death, the name and rank of the deceased, their unit, and cause of death, but just a week after leaving New York, the officers were so overwhelmed that they only wrote down the name and time of death.

The captain's log shows two deaths at 2:00 a.m., one at 2:02 a.m. two at 2:15 a.m. It continued like this throughout the day. The healthy must have been terrified, locked on a ship filled with a deadly

plague

with nowhere to escape. They began to bury men in the sea. At first they were solemn ceremonies, but after so many funerals became routine. They would read a name, say a short prayer and slide the body off the boat and onto the next. The same thing happened on all the ships. Medical advisors pleaded with the military to stop troop movements, but the war machine needed men.

At the same time, it infected the civilian population from port to port and along the railway lines. However, the worst outbreak likely occurred in Philadelphia and was made greatly worse by mismanagement by leaders who ignored warnings from public health doctors. If public health measures had been implemented, perhaps much of the death and suffering could have been avoided. In 1918, Philadelphia was packed with people. Hundreds of thousands had flooded into the city because of new job opportunities in steel plants, docks, rail yards, and industries that supplied the war. Without enough housing for the influx, the poor were crammed into squalid, dirty neighborhoods that lacked indoor plumbing.

Several families crowded into an apartment and shared a latrine in an alley with hundreds of people. Sometimes people shared not only apartments but also beds, and even slept in shifts. The boarding houses rented beds for six or eight hours at a time. When one worker woke up to go to work, another worker would get into the newly vacated bed and sleep, same sheets and all. The streets were notoriously dirty, with rat infestations and sewers filled with garbage, animal and even human excrement. With people living in overcrowded conditions, exhausted from hard work and weak from poor nutrition, dirty water and poor air quality, it was a perfect breeding ground for an epidemic. "I had a little bird named Enza.

I opened the window and en-gri-enza." Children's Jump Rope Rhyme, 1918. A ship full of sick sailors arrived at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in mid-September. Within days, the Navy hospital was overrun and the Navy began sending sailors to civilian hospitals in the city. When sailors began to die, the flu spread to civilians. Two days after the first sailor arrived at the hospital, several doctors and nurses felt well when they began their shifts, but collapsed and became desperately ill within hours. However, the city health office did not want people to panic. They minimized the severity of the disease. After the deaths of several sailors and civilians, the Board of Health confidently declared that the disease had reached its peak and had already begun to subside.

It hadn't even started. At the same time, the federal government was desperate for war bond money to finance the war. People would buy bonds, essentially lending money to the government withthe promise to pay it back later with interest. Each city had a quota of bonds to sell and Philadelphia was ready to hold the Liberty Loan parade to sell war bonds. Public health doctors begged the city to cancel the parade, terrified that the outbreak would become an epidemic. The city government ignored them. On September 28, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of downtown to watch the parade.

In that huddled, huddled crowd, it only took a few coughing and sneezing people to launch the epidemic. Within seventy-six hours, just three days later, the city's 31 hospitals had run out of beds. They were completely full. Some hospitals tried to overcrowd by placing patients on cots in hallways, offices and outside balconies. In some cases, the sick were placed on the floor next to a dying patient. Once the patient died, the body was removed and the new patient was placed in the same bed, still warm from the previous occupant. The city opened several temporary emergency hospitals, but it was not enough.

Hospitals began to refuse to accept more patients. People lined up outside, begging to be let in. Some died waiting in line. Even for those who did come in, care was non-existent for most people. Hospitals ran out of medicines. Doctors and nurses were overworked and suffering from the flu. They were desperate for help. People without medical training volunteered. Doctors and nurses came out of retirement. Medical schools closed and first-year medical students were left in charge of an entire floor of a hospital. One medical student reported that during the height of the outbreak, a quarter of all hospital patients died each day.

The nurses were so overloaded that they began adding toe tags to the living so they could tag several at once. Once a patient turned blue, it was only a matter of hours before they died, so they felt safe labeling them. Sometimes there was no time for intervention and some people died within 24 hours of contracting the flu. A nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital started her shift in the morning and suddenly became ill. She died 12 hours after first feeling sick. The death toll continued to grow. Five days after the city held the Liberty Loan parade, city leaders finally acted.

The Department of Health banned all public gatherings. Churches, schools and theaters were closed. They left the bars open but they also closed the next day. Courts closed and city services closed. It only took a few days for the city's operations to come to a complete halt. In just 10 days, Philadelphia went from a few hundred flu cases and a couple of deaths a day to hundreds of thousands of people sick and hundreds of deaths each day, all because they ignored public health guidelines. Three weeks after the parade, the death toll rose to 4,500. So many died that they couldn't be buried quickly enough.

Gravediggers were sick or refused to bury flu victims. Bodies began to pile up inside morgues and funeral homes. Some funeral homes increased their prices by 500 percent to try to profit. Most were left without coffins. One funeral home that had not sold out hired guards because people were trying to steal the coffins. People began wrapping their dead in blankets or sewing flour sacks to use as shrouds. No one came to collect the bodies and there was nowhere to take them, so the dead remained in the houses. People wrapped them in blankets and put them in closed rooms.

Bodies were placed on porches or stacked in back alleys. In the poor and overcrowded tenements, where several families lived in one apartment, there were no porches or free rooms to store the corpses. They were placed on corners or stacked in alleys next to shared latrines and drinking water pumps. Sometimes people were so sick that the person in bed next to them died and they couldn't muster the strength to carry the body. The city began to smell bad, the stench of death hung heavily in the air. Finally families begin to dig their own graves to bury their dead.

Everyone was terrified. People avoided each other. There were cases of children whose parents fell ill and the children died of hunger because no one came near them in case the child was sick. This was particularly a problem since those most likely to die were people between the ages of 20 and 40, many of them parents. People couldn't get food because there were no trucks delivering goods in the city. The streets fell silent. All businesses were closed. People hid inside their houses. The trams stopped. The police cars stopped. The entire city stopped working. "You were constantly scared. You were scared because you saw so much death around you.

You were surrounded by death. When dawn came each day you didn't know if you would be there when the sun set that day. It wiped out entire families. From the beginning of the day in the morning Until bedtime at night, not a single soul remained." William Sardo, Washington, D.C. The Philadelphia city government was no longer in operation. Wealthy Philadelphia families asked the federal government for help, but there was no help to send. Cities across the United States were buckling under the weight of the epidemic, and the federal government was busy managing the outbreak on military bases and among troops in Europe.

When the city government failed to act, women from Philadelphia's elite families, many of the same ones who had organized the Liberty Loan parade, banded together to begin outreach efforts. They brought together civic leaders from across the city to begin planning. They created a special hotline to answer questions about the flu, but found it difficult to keep staff available because many employees were sick. They established local neighborhood leaders who would organize the distribution of food and medical care. They set up community kitchens in schools and delivered food to the sick when possible. Five hundred people offered their cars as ambulances, to distribute food and take doctors to treat the sick.

However, there was a desperate need for more volunteers and most people were too afraid to participate. The leaders asked for more help but the people refused. The fabric of society began to unravel. City leaders, who had not bothered to attend meetings of the outreach effort, finally got involved. They seized the city's emergency fund to pay for supplies and pay health care workers. They opened additional morgues and sent police to try to remove the piled-up bodies. As in the ancient plagues, people took their dead out into the streets. There the corpses were loaded onto open trucks or horse-drawn carts.

There were no coffins, so they stacked them on top of each other. Also like in the days of the plague, they stopped trying to bury people individually and began digging mass graves where hundreds of bodies were dumped. The city used construction equipment to dig long trenches and push the bodies inside. Someone was standing next to the trench. He would say a prayer and then the steam shovels would push dirt over the piles of bodies. By late October, the epidemic was finally beginning to loosen its deadly grip on the city. It subsequently left 13,000 dead. It also left thousands of orphaned children, shortages of food and goods, and a stagnant city that had to slowly recover its most basic services.

Finally, he left a changed people, full of fear, tired by war and disease and crushed by pain. "The people of Phoenix are facing a crisis. Nearly every home in the city has been affected by the plague." Arizona Republican (newspaper), November 8, 1918. In other cities and towns in the United States the news was the same. In New York City, 33,000 people died before statisticians stopped counting. Some small towns tried to keep the virus away by quarantining. They closed all businesses and canceled public meetings. People were ordered to stay at home and not touch or visit other people. Some cities banned shaking hands.

In other cities, police were sent to nail signs to the doors of homes where people were sick. The signs said "influenza" in red letters. In Phoenix, Arizona, rumors spread that dogs spread the disease. Police killed dogs in the streets and people killed their own pets. Colorado towns set up roadblocks and men guarded them with shotguns, preventing anyone from entering. Other towns were unable to stop trains from passing through their local platforms, but refused to allow anyone to get off. Anyone who did so was imprisoned and quarantined. It didn't work. The virus still got in. The only place where a major city escaped the worst of the wrath was San Francisco, and historians attribute that to the aggressive response of the local government that listened to its public health officials.

Public Health Director William Hassler quarantined all naval stations before any cases were reported. He knew it was only a matter of time. He ordered the closure of all public schools and places of assembly. He divided cities into separate districts with different support staff, to segregate outbreaks. He laid out plans and organized the response to the flu before it came to town, so that they would be ready when it arrived. The city government, medical and civic organizations came together to educate citizens about prevention, such as washing hands, avoiding public places and wearing a mask. While the Philadelphia government continued to deny there was a problem, San Francisco authorities were distributing 100,000 masks.

Police enforced the mask rule at gunpoint and actually shot people who refused to wear masks on the streets. As the second wave subsided across the country, San Francisco rejoiced that the flu had gone unnoticed. The fluid would mutate once again and lay waste to the world for a third time, but it would infect and kill fewer people. This time it would be less serious. This time it did affect San Francisco because they thought the flu was already over. The third wave hit the South, West, and Midwest hard, but the rest of the United States. The worst of the flu was over.

Even when the United States woke up from the nightmare, the epidemic had left its mark. Right at the height of the harvest, farmers were too sick to work and workers did not show up to pick up food. The harvested food rotted in warehouses because there was no one to transport it. There was a delay as the country tried to catch up with the shipment of food and goods and shelves in stores and markets remained empty for some time because goods had not been delivered. As winter came, there were shortages of coal and other goods. However, the weary country still rejoiced that an armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.

The war finally ended, even as the plague and its effects persisted. In the United States it killed about 675,000 people. The flu killed about 3 percent of the entire world's population. In Latin America, the flu killed 10 out of every 1,000 people. In Africa, about 15 in every 1,000 died, and in some parts of Asia, the death rate was as high as 35 per thousand. In Tahiti, it killed ten percent of the population, and in Western Samoa, 20 percent of the population died. In India alone it killed about 20 million people. You may be wondering: could a deadly flu like that happen again? It is important to understand that the Spanish flu was devastating for several reasons unique to that time.

However, the essential formula for the epidemic still exists. Viruses sometimes jump species, for example from pigs to humans. This could happen at any time anywhere in the world and of course flu viruses are constantly mutating. Usually the mutations are minor, but occasionally a large mutation can occur. This has happened several times in recent history. For example, the Russian flu of 1889 killed about 1 million people, the Asian flu of 1957 killed about 2 million, and the Hong Kong flu of 1968 also killed about 2 million. Then in 2018, exactly 100 years after the Spanish flu outbreak, the mutation brought a particularly deadly flu to the United States and Australia.

As of 2018, there is a strain of bird flu, type h5, that has managed to infect humans, but so far it cannot be transmitted between people. However, that particular strain of flu has frightening potential, according to Dr. Donald Burke, former director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Immunization Research. Of the people who have been infected, it has beenfatal in more than 75 percent of cases. If that type of flu adapted to person-to-person infection, it could be catastrophic. So could it happen again? Yes, it could. As Burke said: "When it comes to the likelihood of a pandemic flu, I think everyone would say it's not if.

It's when." However, there are reasons to be hopeful. When a new type of flu emerged in 2009, a swine flu similar to the Spanish flu, officials wasted no time in acting. Public officials acted quickly and launched emergency plans against the epidemic. We were lucky that the 2009 swine flu, although highly contagious, was not a deadly strain, and it showed us that the response is very important. In fact, how we respond to the next big epidemic could mean the difference between life and death. If you liked this video, please like, share and subscribe for more videos.