Hints of a pandemic's wrath found in look back at 1918 influenza crisis
Patients in an emergency hospital in Camp Funston, Kansas, during the 1918 flu outbreak. Credit: AP / National Museum of Health
As Long Islanders endured the 1918 influenza pandemic, schools were closed and converted into hospitals. Police arrested people for sneezing without covering their faces, and even street sweepers wore masks, according to historical accounts of the era.
Long Island had the advantage of having sparsely populated areas, which helped hamper the spread of the disease from person-to-person, said Libby O'Connell, former chief historian for the History Channel.
But the Island also had military forts, which were a veritable breeding ground for the virus, as well as the Long Island Rail Road, which hastened the spread of it, O'Connell said.
Camp Upton in Brookhaven Town was a major place for World War I troops disembarking for Europe. When troops there started coming down with the flu en masse, military officials tried to downplay it, not wanting to alert the enemy of any weakness, said O'Connell, who lives in Huntington.
"The camp was a center of contagion," she said.
By October 1918, as the pandemic grew into its worst phase, the virus reached most of the villages on Long Island, according to a 1976 Newsday article recalling the pandemic. Doctors, nurses and morticians scrambled to help people and stem the tide of the disease. Many health workers, however, were also felled by the flu, according to the article "Of Death and Sorrow."
Troops at Camp Mills in Garden City also came down with the disease. They were not quarantined but military police stationed outside theaters and ballrooms prevented the troops' entry. The Mineola Fair, not far from the camp, was postponed, according to the article written by Virginia Sheward.
At Camp Upton, there were 4,371 cases of influenza by Oct. 5, 1918. Twenty men died that day. Overwhelmed, medical officers established temporary hospitals. They hung sheets between beds, trying to prevent further spread of the infection, according to a 2018 article on the United States Army website.
"Soldiers will not be permitted to sit opposite each other at mess tables. Foodstuffs other than in sealed packages will not be sold in the post exchanges, and no person unmasked will be permitted in any YMCA or other welfare building," the New York Times reported at the time.
In an Oct. 14, 1918, edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a headline read, "Influenza claims many lives on LI." The article noted that 13 members of a Flushing parish had died in a week, and that four deaths were reported in 12 hours in Rockville Centre.
O'Connell noted that many people died of the secondary bacterial infection of pneumonia. Antibiotics had not yet been discovered, and while antibiotics don't work on the viral infection of flu, they are effective against bacterial infections, she said.
"We can control it much better now," she said.
Craig Schneider is a Long Island native and Stony Brook University alumnus. He joined Newsday as a general assignment reporter in January 2018 after 20 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
