‘Spanish’ flu killed 100 million
Widespread disasters such as threatened by the coronavirus are not new to the world. More than a hundred years the so-called ‘Spanish’ took millions.

BBC History Magazine Website

When Private Albert Gitchell awoke on Monday 4 March 1918, he felt awful. A company cook at Fort Riley, Kansas, Gitchell was supposed to be serving breakfast to hundreds of young American recruits who were waiting to be shipped off to the battlefields of France.  But when the doctors had a look at him, they realized that, with a temperature of more than 103, Gitchell was in no state to work in the mess.

A few hours later, another man, Corporal Lee Drake, appeared at the infirmary with similar symptoms. Then another, Sergeant Adolph Hurby. The men kept coming. There were 107 by lunchtime and more than 500 by the end of the week. By the end of the month, no fewer than 1,127 men at Fort Riley had come down with flu – and 46 of them had died.

In the next few months, as American soldiers flooded into Europe, they brought the deadly influenza with them. With vast armies surging across an exhausted continent, the conditions were perfect for a pandemic.

This was one of history’s deadliest disasters. Across the world, some 500 million people had been struck down by flu by the end of 1920, perhaps 100 million of them fatally.

Many governments banned public gatherings or buried the victims in mass graves. Reporting restrictions in the combatant nations meant that the disease’s progress in neutral Spain drew disproportionate attention: hence its nickname, Spanish flu. Only one populated part of the world reported no cases at all: the island of Marajo, at the mouth of the Amazon.