The Philadelphia parade
1918 · Event
Warned by doctors, Philadelphia holds its 200,000-strong Liberty Loan parade anyway; within six weeks over 12,000 Philadelphians are dead, bodies stacked in homes for days. St Louis, which cancelled its gatherings and closed its schools, suffers a death rate half as high — the textbook case, cited in every pandemic since, for acting early.
On these timelines: The Spanish Flu, Pandemics & Plagues, Medicine through Time, USA, Master
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