From an article on The Spanish Flu: Some saw an enemy hand at work. Rumors spread that the Kaiser’s U-boats had released poison clouds in American ports and that German pharmaceutical company Bayer had tainted its aspirin tablets. Preachers such as Billy Sunday blamed sin ...
Over 11,000 Philadelphia residents died in October 1918, including 759 on the worst day of the outbreak. Drivers of open carts kept a near-constant vigil circling streets while hollering, “Bring out your dead!” They then deposited the collected corpses in mass graves . . .
By the time it abated in 1920, the Spanish flu had killed 675,000 Americans and left hundreds of thousands of children orphaned. Not only did more Americans die of the Spanish flu than in World War I, more died than in all the wars of the 20th century combined...
Globally, the pandemic infected a third of the planet’s population and killed an estimated 50 million people.
