…and is, unfortunately, happening again.
From I Should Be Laughing:
We've been here before, you know, and clearly, we have learned nothing.
Picture it. America, 1918. The first World War was winding down and officials across the country were under enormous pressure to sell war bonds. But how do you attract attention to your bonds? Hold a parade in major cities to rally the public behind the war bond effort.
Trouble is, or was, America was in the throes of a pandemic—the Spanish Flu—and people were dying all over the place; when it was all said and done 675,000 Americans died of the Spanish Flu—50 million people globally—compared to 116,708 Americans killed in World War I.
Doctors were at a loss as to what to recommend to their patients; many urged people to avoid crowded places or simply other people, and also told people to keep their mouths and noses covered in public.
Sounds vaguely familiar, no? That September 1918, in Philadelphia, 600 sailors and 47 civilians had been diagnosed with the flu, and some had already perished. But, hey, there were bonds to sell the fund the war, and on September 28, 1918, Philadelphia held a parade to sell war bonds.
On the 28th, a line of Boy Scouts, marching bands, women's auxiliary groups, and troops 2 miles long wound its way up Broad Street in front of a crowd of over 200,000 people. Within three days, every bed in Philadelphia's 31 hospitals was occupied. Within a week, 45,000 citizens were infected, and the entire city had shut down. By the second week in November, 12,000 Philadelphians were dead, and the phrase "bodies stacked like cordwood" had become commonplace among the survivors. Within six months, 16,000 were dead, and 500,000 Philadelphians had fallen ill with the flu.
Now, I don't wanna bash Philadelphia, because that wasn't the only city to hold a parade or to urge citizens to come out in droves and mingle with one another, but …
Take Milwaukee, for example; they had the lowest death rate of any large city in America during the pandemic, because the city's health commissioner, Dr. George Ruhland, had ordered schools closed, saloons and public spaces shut down, and told people to stay home.
And yet here we are again, in the midst of a pandemic where we are told that social distancing, self-isolating, will stop the spread of COVID-19 and we have not learned one goddamned thing.