http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print Precautions taken in Seattle, Wash., during the Spanish Influenza Epidemic would not permit anyone to ride on the street cars without wearing a mask.

The initial public awareness of the Spanish Flu and COVID-19 in Warren County are quite similar — county residents saw the pandemic from afar.

On September 25, 1918, the Warren Evening Times reported on the issue:

“Governor’s Council today appropriated a special fund to be used in the fight to check the epidemic of influenza that is sweeping Massachusetts. The work will be carried out by officials of the state board of health and the surgeon general of (the) Massachusetts State Guard. An order was adopted confirming all steps this far taken by health authorities.”

That September report noted that in Chicago “the cases of Spanish influenza in the city numbering only seventy, and health officials declaring its spread has been successfully checked.

“The fear of its invasion from the north was lessened here today by report from the Great Lakes naval training station that the number of victims there has been reduced… where the sufferers numbered between five and six thousand decreased to 68 for the day, and the number of new cases was only 369.

“This is looked upon as a favorable turn of events by authorities at the naval station.”

An additional military camp, Camp Grant, was “in partial quarantine while a successful fight against the epidemic there is in progress.”

Those positive reports appear to have lulled some local residents into some level of denial.

More advanced medical knowledge didn’t help.

Oct. 5, 1918, the Warren Evening Times provided a little historical medical background:

“If people were sick they tried charms, or, later, patent medicines and prayed,” the report states. “They had no idea how the sickness was spread, what caused it or how to avoid it.”

The paper reported that germ theory didn’t come into existence until 1870.

“By it, we fight yellow fever by excluding the mosquito, and we prevent malaria the same way,” the report states. “We chase the rats and other rodents to beat Asiatic cholera; we isolate and clean up to stop the spread of other diseases.

“It is a great comfort to know, when a plague sweeps from one part of the world to another, that precautions will help and that similar dangers have been overcome by science. We are slow in finding out some things as to diseases. The grip, pneumonia, and some other ills seem elusive. But someday we shall do better.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the 1918-19 Spanish flu was “was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin.

But it’s only been in the last few years that we’ve learned those specific traits and, per the CDC, this strain caused “unique” high mortality in healthy people aged 20-40.

“While the 1918 H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated, the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood,” according to the CDC. “With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.

That 1918 news report was correct that influenza’s solution had been “elusive.”

But the very next paragraph of that report wiped those concerns out of the mind of its readers.

“In the meantime, we may look unterrified upon the influenza epidemic and have confidence that a healthful and clean people will some way stop the spread of pneumonia, even those that disease attacks some of the best physically endowed of our sons and afflicts those of correct personal habits.”

This is the second story on the Spanish Flu of 1918 in Warren County and beyond.