Not the spring. Soldiers wouldn’t be coming home until 1919.

My grand uncle Frank was coming home from France late Nov 1918 when he contracted the flu aboard the USS Imperator and died before reaching the US.

This comparison to 1918 is super-troubling. A common quote from survivors from the 1918 pandemic is how everyone knew *someone* who died from the flu. I have a sinking feeling that'll be the case with this pandemic. We'll all know at least one person, a neighbor, an aunt, maybe even a parent or sibling, who died from it.

The infection arose among army recruits at camps in the Midwest (Kansas, I think) and was sent over to the European theater where it spread as a relatively mild flu.
I will conjecture that the virus mutated with what was in Spain and then became much more virulent.

I just hope this current one doesn’t mutate around the time of the election. That would be disastrous!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/

How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America
The toll of history’s worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And it may have begun in the United States
By John M. Barry
Smithsonian Magazine
November 2017

Haskell County, Kansas, lies in the southwest corner of the state, near Oklahoma and Colorado. In 1918 sod houses were still common, barely distinguishable from the treeless, dry prairie they were dug out of. It had been cattle country—a now bankrupt ranch once handled 30,000 head—but Haskell farmers also raised hogs, which is one possible clue to the origin of the crisis that would terrorize the world that year. Another clue is that the county sits on a major migratory flyway for 17 bird species, including sand hill cranes and mallards. Scientists today understand that bird influenza viruses, like human influenza viruses, can also infect hogs, and when a bird virus and a human virus infect the same pig cell, their different genes can be shuffled and exchanged like playing cards, resulting in a new, perhaps especially lethal, virus.

We cannot say for certain that that happened in 1918 in Haskell County, but we do know that an influenza outbreak struck in January, an outbreak so severe that, although influenza was not then a “reportable” disease, a local physician named Loring Miner—a large and imposing man, gruff, a player in local politics, who became a doctor before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease but whose intellectual curiosity had kept him abreast of scientific developments—went to the trouble of alerting the U.S. Public Health Service. The report itself no longer exists, but it stands as the first recorded notice anywhere in the world of unusual influenza activity that year. The local newspaper, the Santa Fe Monitor, confirms that something odd was happening around that time: “Mrs. Eva Van Alstine is sick with pneumonia...Ralph Lindeman is still quite sick...Homer Moody has been reported quite sick...Pete Hesser’s three children have pneumonia ...Mrs J.S. Cox is very weak yet...Ralph Mc-Connell has been quite sick this week...Mertin, the young son of Ernest Elliot, is sick with pneumonia,...Most everybody over the country is having lagrippe or pneumonia.”

Several Haskell men who had been exposed to influenza went to Camp Funston, in central Kansas. Days later, on March 4, the first soldier known to have influenza reported ill. The huge Army base was training men for combat in World War I, and within two weeks 1,100 soldiers were admitted to the hospital, with thousands more sick in barracks. Thirty-eight died. Then, infected soldiers likely carried influenza from Funston to other Army camps in the States—24 of 36 large camps had outbreaks—sickening tens of thousands, before carrying the disease overseas. Meanwhile, the disease spread into U.S. civilian communities.

The influenza virus mutates rapidly, changing enough that the human immune system has difficulty recognizing and attacking it even from one season to the next. A pandemic occurs when an entirely new and virulent influenza virus, which the immune system has not previously seen, enters the population and spreads worldwide. Ordinary seasonal influenza viruses normally bind only to cells in the upper respiratory tract—the nose and throat—which is why they transmit easily. The 1918 pandemic virus infected cells in the upper respiratory tract, transmitting easily, but also deep in the lungs, damaging tissue and often leading to viral as well as bacterial pneumonias.

That’s probably where I first saw it mentioned.

I'm hoping that with modern hygiene, we can prevent such numbers. I often think of the lack of disposable tissues and use of handkerchiefs back then. Ick.

Unfortunately, this modern age includes much more travel by citizens than long ago. So that will encourage the spread.

(www.cdc.gov)

at least not yet, so that's a plus, right?

It's going to be a risk reward thing on if there's anything available by then. My guess is not.

As always, we ignore the lessons of history to our peril...