fbpx
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Sign up for Free Newsletter
  • Print Edition
    • Get Home Delivery
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
    • Advertise
    • Customer Support
    • Submit A News Tip
    • Where’s My Paper?
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Free HV1 Trial
Hudson Valley One
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Featured Events
      • Art
      • Books
      • Kids
      • Lifestyle & Wellness
      • Food & Drink
      • Music
      • Nature
      • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
    • Editorials
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Help Wanted
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Podcast
  • Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Featured Events
      • Art
      • Books
      • Kids
      • Lifestyle & Wellness
      • Food & Drink
      • Music
      • Nature
      • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
    • Editorials
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Help Wanted
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Podcast
  • Log In
No Result
View All Result
Hudson Valley One
No Result
View All Result

Now that was a pandemic

by John Burdick
April 29, 2020
in Village Voices
2
Why did the Spanish flu kill so many people?

A normal flu epidemic kills about one in a thousand of those who contract the disease. But the 1918 Spanish flu was a hundred times deadlier, especially in vulnerable demographics, which oddly included what is normally the hardiest age group: the 20-to-40-year-olds. (Above) An emergency hospital at Camp Funston, Kansas, cared for large numbers of soldiers sickened by the 1918 flu. Photo from National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, DC.

Spring chases itself through the trees of the village on the first nice day in about 83 years. The streets of New Paltz are not empty, a little disconcertingly not empty. As I make my daily trek to my mother’s house across town, I just imagine it is Halloween and that for some reason nearly everyone chose a kind of half-assed surgeon’s costume this year. What are the odds?

Today, I head to my mother’s with a bit of burning question in my mind — an historical question for her, an historical being. Anything to get our minds off the acute worry-go-round, I guess of this time and this stage of life. Today some stray link clicking on the CDC website led to an hour engrossed in the story of the Spanish flu.

Spanish influenza set a pretty high bar for global pandemics. Its tallies are staggering: an estimated 52 million dead between 1918 and 1920 worldwide, among them nearly 700,000 Americans. A full two percent of the world’s population fell to it.

Lest we minimize it as some kind of planetary herd thinning of the elderly and infirm, Spanish flu had an appetite for those in the 15-to-35 age range, a population — when you think about it — that had just been pretty aggressively pruned by World War One. Science still doesn’t fully understand this unique property of the 1918 H1N1.

The seamless continuum of ruin that the Spanish flu forms with the Great War may alone explain why the worst of all modern pandemics doesn’t stand out more historically. Civilization, it seems, was inured to acute, voracious tragedy. Everything was already fully disrupted when it hit. The fragmented disjunctions and violence of modernist art, we are taught, were a direct consequence and expression of World War I. The old forms in all the arts no long made sense in a world of war-ravaged social foundations. Methinks Spanish flu may be under-credited for its role in the music of Schoenberg and the poetry of Eliot.

I ask my mother, who turns 93 in days and who was born less than a decade after that historic viral outbreak began, whether awareness of Spanish flu was fresh, the wounds still open, during her childhood.

“Maybe,” she says, I don’t know.”

Ask her about the crash and the Depression, which began in October of her third year on earth, and you get a very different response.

Tags: John Burdick Village Voices
Thank you for reading Hudson Valley One. We rely on your support to continue providing local, substantive news. Please check out our subscription options to keep local journalism alive in the Hudson Valley.
- Geddy Sveikauskas, Publisher
Previous Post

Filled with life

Next Post

Quarantine scones

John Burdick

Related Posts

Village Voices are on hold
Village Voices

Village Voices are on hold

November 17, 2020
A liberal education
Village Voices

Keeping it all together

August 24, 2020
Writing about oneself
Village Voices

I need a day off

August 24, 2020
Saugerties initiative combating addiction and suicide adds more events
Village Voices

Time travel

August 24, 2020
Where to buy face masks locally
Village Voices

A story of three states

September 2, 2020
The kids talk politics
Village Voices

Stories on the ballot

August 23, 2020
Next Post
Quarantine scones

Quarantine scones

Please login to join discussion

Trending News

  • Shrestha upsets Cahill while Hochul, Delgado prevail in Dem primaries 1.8k views
  • AutoCamp Catskills brings fleet of Airstreams to former Saugerties KOA 1.8k views
  • Planned auto repair shop in Saugerties concerns neighbors 1.3k views
  • No contractors available for Saugerties schools work 515 views
  • Shaggy lawns may mean fines in Saugerties 505 views







Latest HV1 Podcast

Weather

Kingston
◉
81°
Sunny
5:24am8:35pm EDT
Feels like: 82°F
Wind: 2mph SSE
Humidity: 50%
Pressure: 30.09"Hg
UV index: 0
FriSatSun
93/70°F
88/61°F
86/57°F
Weather forecast Kingston, New York ▸

Ulster County COVID-19 Active Cases

Subscribe

Independent. Local. Substantive. Subscribe now.

  • Subscribe & Support
  • Sign up for Free Newsletter
  • Print Edition
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Free HV1 Trial

© 2022 Ulster Publishing

No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Featured Events
      • Art
      • Books
      • Kids
      • Lifestyle & Wellness
      • Food & Drink
      • Music
      • Nature
      • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
    • Editorials
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Help Wanted
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Podcast
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Contact Us
    • Customer Support
    • Advertise
    • Submit A News Tip
  • Print Edition
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
    • Where’s My Paper
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Log In
  • Free HV1 Trial

© 2022 Ulster Publishing