“He diagnosed the disease as Influenza. But he has never seen Influenza like this. This was violent, rapid in its progress through the body, sometimes lethal. This Influenza killed. Soon dozens of his patients – the strongest, the healthiest, the most robust people in the county – were struck down as suddenly as if they had been shot”

“All Influenza viruses mutate constantly”

“On September 27, the day before the parade, hospitals admitted 200 people sufferings from Influenza. Krusen felt intense and increasing pressure to cancel the parade. Krusen declared that the Liberty Loan Parade and associated rallies would proceed. On September 28, greatest parade in the history of the city proudly stepped forward. Two days later Krusen issued a public statement that epidemic is circulating the common population. Within 72 hours every single bed of city’s 31 hospital was filled. On the third day on Parade, 117 people died in a day. That number would double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, sextuple.”

“What should I do? people wondered with dread. How long will it go? Each day people discovered that friends and neighbors who had been perfectly a week – or a day – earlier were dead.”

“The ability to smell was affected, sometime for weeks.”

“The immune system of young adults mounted massive response to virus. That immune response filled lungs with fluid and debris, making it impossible for the exchange of oxygen to take place. The immune response killed.”   

“Nature chose to rage, and it chose the form of the influenza virus in which to do it. This meant the nature first crept upon the world in familiar, almost comic, form. It came in masquerade. Then it pulled down its mask and showed its fleshless bone.” 

“Newspaper reported on the disease with the same mixture of truth and half-truths, truth and distortion, truth and lies with which they reported everything else.” 

“The hospitals were choked so that it was impossible to remove the dead quickly enough to make room for the dying, the streets and the lanes of the cities were littered with dead and dying people, the burning ghats and burial grounds were literally swamped with corpses, whilst an even greater number awaited removal, the depleted medical service , itself sorely stricken by the epidemic, was incapable of dealing with more than a minute fraction of the sickness requiring attention, nearly every household was lamenting a death, and everywhere terror and confusion reigned” 

Oh by the way folks I am quoting here from two books that were written on 1918 Influenza Pandemic and not the current Covid-19 crisis. The first book is called Great Influenza by John M. Barry and the second book is The Age of Pandemics by Chinmay Tumbe and he has quoted Norman White’s, then Sanitary Commissioner of British India, in his Preliminary Report on the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in India.

An estimated 20 million people died in India with 50 millions deaths all over the world. Indian population at that time was about 300 million which meant 6% of the overall population due to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. The virus was named H1N1 which is still circulating and what we know as Swine Flu.

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” – Churchill