Letters From The 1918 Pandemic

05/04/20 • 12 min

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The 1918 flu outbreak was one of the most devastating pandemics in world history, infecting one third of the world's population and killing an estimated 50 million people. While our understanding of infectious diseases and their spread has come a long way since then, 1918 was notably a time when the U.S. practiced widespread social distancing.
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How An Early Plan To Spot The Virus Fell Weeks Behind

In several major cities, public health officials work every year to monitor the flu. It's called sentinel surveillance. And as early as mid-February, the government had a plan to use that system to find early cases of the coronavirus, by testing patients with flu-like symptoms.
But NPR's Lauren Sommer reports the effort was slow to get started, costing weeks in the fight to control the spread of the virus. Read more from Lauren's reporting here.
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