'Thanks to the quarantine, St. Louis’ death rate in 1918 was lowest among major U.S. cities. In Philadelphia, where bodies piled up on sidewalks when the morgues overflowed, the death rate was nearly twice as high.''In early October, city health commissioner Dr. Max C. Starkloff ordered the closure of schools, movie theaters, saloons, sporting events and other public gathering spots. Churches were told to suspend Sunday services. At the time, with nearly 800,000 residents, St. Louis was among the top 10 largest American cities.
“In an epidemic, somebody has to have the authority to make those kinds of decisions that infringe on people’s rights,” said Pamela Walker, who was the city’s health director from 2007 to 2015. “He had been health director for long enough to know his city and how people interacted. He also had the public’s trust.”
Chris Gordon, director of library and collections at the Missouri History Museum, called Starkloff’s decision “a bold step.”
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With the flu continuing its rampage, Starkloff imposed a stricter quarantine in November, closing down all businesses with few exceptions including banks, newspapers, embalmers and coffin makers, according to Post-Dispatch archives.
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The quarantine was temporarily lifted Nov. 18 but reinstated when the flu roared back in December. By Dec. 10 the flu peaked in the city with 60 deaths in one day. After illnesses declined sharply, the quarantine was lifted just after Christmas.
By the end of the flu season the next spring, the city had counted 31,500 illnesses and 1,703 deaths.
Thanks to the quarantine, St. Louis’ death rate in 1918 was lowest among major U.S. cities. In Philadelphia, where bodies piled up on sidewalks when the morgues overflowed, the death rate was nearly twice as high.
Rural areas in Missouri were not immune to the outbreak. Dr. J. Lee Harwell was one of a dozen doctors in Poplar Bluff at the time, said his grandson, Dr. Larry Harwell, 80, of University City.
“My grandfather’s stories of the epidemic were frightening,” Harwell said. “People would die in a waiting room.”
J. Lee Harwell and other doctors made house calls to the farms, collecting livestock as their payment. Many patients died in the buggies on the way back to town. Harwell said his grandfather’s diary entries for 1918 stopped at Nov. 15.
“The only entry on every page after that had only one word: FLU. There was none of his usual chatter, so I can only presume all hell broke loose and he was too tired to write anything else,” Harwell said.
At the end of its disastrous run, the Spanish flu of 1918 infected one-third of the world’s population and killed 50 million or more worldwide, including 675,000 Americans. In the last decade, the flu has caused 12,000 to 56,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Still, flu experts believe the next pandemic is already lurking in a bird in China or a pig in Kansas, mutating on its path toward humans.
“Even though we are very prepared for it, we have to be careful to guard against being complacent,” Lawrence said. “We should be and must be vigilant.” '
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
St. Louis saw the deadly 1918 Spanish flu epidemic coming. Shutting down the city saved countless lives, February 12, 2018
'He said he was "deeply concerned" by "alarming levels of inaction" over the virus.''The coronavirus outbreak has been labelled a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO).
WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the number of cases outside China had increased 13-fold over the past two weeks.
He said he was "deeply concerned" by "alarming levels of inaction" over the virus.
A pandemic is a disease that is spreading in multiple countries around the world at the same time.
However, Dr Tedros said that calling the outbreak a pandemic did not mean the WHO was changing its advice about what countries should do.
He called on governments to change the course of the outbreak by taking "urgent and aggressive action".
"Several countries have demonstrated that this virus can be suppressed and controlled," he said.
"The challenge for many countries who are now dealing with large clusters or community transmission is not whether they can do the same - it's whether they will."
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Dr Ryan said the situation in Iran - where there were 354 deaths among 9,000 cases - was "very serious". The WHO had sent 40,000 testing kits to Iran but there was still a shortage of ventilators and oxygen.
"Iran and Italy are suffering now but I guarantee you other countries will be in that situation very soon," he said.
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Several countries - including Sweden and Bulgaria, as well as the Republic of Ireland - have recorded their first deaths, while the number of confirmed cases in Qatar jumped from 24 to 262.
China - where the virus was first detected - has seen a total of 80,754 confirmed cases and 3,136 deaths. But it recorded its lowest number of new infections, just 19, on Tuesday.'
- BBC,
Coronavirus confirmed as pandemic by World Health Organization, March 11, 2020
'The case of the Netherlands shows how a flawed belief about transmission filtered down throughout society, enabling the virus to spread..''The position of Dutch authorities was that only people with symptoms could transmit coronavirus. It was repeated by the government, national and local health authorities, justifying a cascade of decisions that allowed the Netherlands to keep up a “business as usual” attitude even as the virus exponentially spread.
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The case of the Netherlands shows how a flawed belief about transmission filtered down throughout society, enabling the virus to spread. It also makes for a grand experiment in what happens when a country takes a relaxed approach to the virus, placing the maintenance of normality, personal responsibility and individual freedoms first.
The first coronavirus diagnosis in the Netherlands was on February 27th. As authorities traced his contacts, they found he had attended Carnival in the city of Tilburg in the North Brabant region on February 21st-25th. “The patient was not contagious in the days he celebrated the carnival,” the mayor of Tilburg Theo Weterings told media.'
- The Irish Times,
How Dutch false sense of security helped coronavirus spread, March 10, 2020
Context'..CNN is using the term pandemic to describe the current coronavirus outbreak..', March 9, 2020
(Bloomberg) - Faulty, limited testing in Japan, U.S., could worsen outbreak(Trump Admin Incompetence) - '..workers were potentially exposed to coronavirus because appropriate steps were not taken to protect them..''..doubt on Trump team's coronavirus response .. the virus could bring severe disruption to American life..'