100 years ago, another epidemic terrorized the city Boston’s reaction to a dangerous virus hasn’t changed much in a century: A narrative of the Spanish flu in the city where it began.

Boston Globe ^ | ,Updated March 14, 2020, | Dugan Arnett

[daniel1212]

As August 1918 wound to a close in Boston and summer’s dog days gave way to fall, the city was awash in optimism...So when, in late August, a handful of sailors stationed at Commonwealth Pier in what is now the South Boston Seaport fell terribly ill, no one in the city paid much mind..The new flu arrived quickly at Camp Devens in Ayer...a bustling barracks of some 45,000 soldiers...with as many as 1,543 soldiers reporting ill with influenza in a single day...

It wasn’t until Sept. 15, roughly three weeks after the first soldiers reported ill, that the influenza epidemic reached the front page of The Boston Post. “Spanish Grip Claims Nine..”

Any hopes that the flu might pass quickly had been extinguished by mid-September. Though some communities had remained relatively unscathed — ..such places were increasingly rare...The flu ripped through workplaces, particularly large businesses. At one point, the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company reported that 800 of its 4,000 employees were out sick, nearly all with the flu. Many businesses locked their doors..

Almost from the start, hospitals struggled to keep up...On Sept. 26, almost a month to the day after the first case surfaced, Boston’s newly appointed health commissioner, William Woodward, a Georgetown-educated physician who’d been instrumental in the fight against typhoid fever a decade earlier, imposed a so-called “gathering ban," closing down all theaters, soda shops, and saloons until the epidemic could be controlled. Many schools had already been shuttered, and most churches, if they hadn’t already, soon followed suit....

By the time September wound to a merciful close, the virus had proven so deadly, taking 700 lives in the final week of the month alone, that it was being discussed much in the same way as an enemy army.

[aquila48]

And back then the US population was one third what it is now. Today that death rate would result in 2 miilion dead.