Epidemics, or at least strong local outbreaks of illness… cholera, diphtheria, and dysentery among them… occurred pretty frequently in our county’s history. But numbers are hard to sort out, and even if you had them, those numbers would need to be compared against a constantly-changing total population before we could get a feel for how things stood relatively. But it’s probably safe to say that the worst outbreak of disease was the 1918 “Spanish Influenza” pandemic, which may have killed one human being out of every twenty on earth. It was one of the greatest natural disasters ever, killing as many (or more) in four months as the Great War did in four years. It was a catastrophe on a par with the “Black Death,” or Native America’s population crash under European diseases. But probably BECAUSE it was so close to the war, it’s been almost forgotten.
*There were two major spikes of the disease, one in early 1918 and another, even deadlier, in August through November. I looked particularly at the period which seemed worst locally, in last three weekly Advocate issues for October.
*Screening out deaths from military causes, and deaths that were obviously not flu-related, I totted up the deaths reported in these issues, and I found deaths ascribed to:
*Pneumonia 25 (usually due to flu)
*Influenza 14
*Unstated 42
*Or 81 deaths, not counting those excluded above.
*By contrast, in 2014 the last three October issues of the Courier listed 11 deaths.
*During this period of 1918 schools closed in Bath, Avoca, Corning, Hammondsport, Savona, and parts of Wheeler. Churches canceled services in Avoca, Corning, Prattsburgh, and South Bradford.
*In Mount Morris, horse-drawn scrapers dug graves for multiple burials. Dansville and Bath were reported as being hit hard.
*Public places were closed in the Corning area, where about 3500 became ill and something like 70 died. Emergency hospitals were set up in Corning and Painted Post… the latter unit supervised by Ingersoll-Rand.
*Such hospitals couldn’t do much, in fact. Even today, we can’t cure even a single viral disease.
*Hammondsport school children were ordered to stay on their own premises under pain of arrest. Quarantined families were kept alive by neighbors leaving food on doorsteps. Churches and lodges were asked to close.
*Although cases would continue for months, the worst outbreak tailed off so quickly it was bewildering… perhaps due as much to mutation in the virus as it was to the quarantine. By November 6, the Hammondsport flu quarantine was lifted (November 8 in Bath), just in time for jubilant crowds to celebrate the Armistice, on the eleventh day of that eleventh month.
*This flu acted with horrifying speed — people who woke up hale died in agony before sunset… although you could suffer far longer than that, and of course many patients did in fact survive. Bewlideringly, the flu seemed to strike hard at younger people — such as men of military age — while leaving older folks mostly untouched — a reversal of the usual situation with influenza.
*New York’s health commissioner nailed it at the time from studying the demographics… this flu was a more virulent variant of a flu that come come through decades earlier, so many older folks, having contracted the earlier mild form, had an immunity. He even figured which previous outbreak this had been, and his analysis has been confirmed by modern scientific studies.
*Why Spanish? With much of the world at war, each side feared that this unprecedentedly deadly disease was germ warfare from the other side… and even if it WASN’T, they didn’t want the enemy to know how badly they were affected. Neutral Spain was one of the few good-sized western countries without censorship, so a lot of information and news came from Spain, and the rest is (slightly misleading) history.