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DAY IN HISTORY-MAR 11, 1918
Spanish Flu Infects the U.S.
Country loses 675,000 lives to a pandemic
Everyone remembers the COVID-19 pandemic that officially began in the U.S. in January 2020. It eventually resulted in the deaths of over one million Americans and almost seven million people worldwide.
This was not the first time such a serious pandemic came to the United States or the world. The 1918 pandemic that hit the U.S. was called the “Spanish flu,” but it is believed influenza first spread, not in Spain, but in the United States. Ironically, the flu was identified as “Spanish” only because Spain was one of the few nations to be neutral in World War I; that country was therefore not prevented by wartime censors from reporting about the disease.
On March 11, 1918, at Ft. Riley, Kansas, one of the very first cases of Spanish flu was recorded. Within a single week, 522 men flooded the camp hospital with the same illness. The U.S. Army was stricken with similar outbreaks in facilities in six states, and the U.S. Navy experienced outbreaks among crews who served on ships docked on the East Coast.
U.S. service personnel on their way to Europe to fight in the war incubated the virus. Once off their ships, they spread Spanish flu rapidly until soldiers fighting on both sides — in…
