PANDEMIC: More than 100 years before the coronavirus pandemic, a powerful flu killed tens of millions of people worldwide and brought life in many U.S. cities to a standstill.

• Author: Bubar, Joe
• Position: TIMES PAST 1918

When Violet Harris, a 15-year-old junior at Lincoln High School in Seattle, learned on October 5, 1918, that officials were shutting down schools to halt the spread of a deadly disease known then as the Spanish flu, she responded like many students: with excitement.

"It was announced in the papers tonight that all churches, shows, and schools would be closed until further notice, to prevent Spanish influenza from spreading," she wrote in her diary. "Good idea? I'll say it is! So will every other school kid, I calculate."

But those initial good feelings didn't last. They soon turned to worry as the flu spread throughout her community, forcing everyone to wear masks whenever they went outside and even infecting her best friend, Rena.

"I stayed in all day and didn't even go to Rena's," Violet wrote about a month later. "The flu seems to be spreading, and Mama doesn't want us to go around more than we need to."

If Violet's experience sounds familiar, that's because more than 100 years before COVID-19, the world faced another deadly pandemic. It's estimated that by the time the flu subsided in 1919, it had infected one in every three people worldwide and killed at least 50 million--making it the worst pandemic since the bubonic plague in the 14th century.

Though the COVID-19 death toll has been far lower than that of the 1918 flu, many historians see similarities between the two pandemics. Just as today, officials back then were forced to make difficult decisions about closing schools and implementing social distancing.

"I'm often struck by how ancient this [current] pandemic feels," says Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. "We don't have a vaccine yet, so the only way we can slow the spread of the disease is to use these social distancing measures, and they are not new. They were used in 1918 and in previous pandemics."

World War I & the Flu

Though it was dubbed the Spanish flu, some experts think it originated in the U.S. However, nobody knows for certain.

What is known is that on March 4, 1918, a young man showed up with the flu at the hospital at Camp Funston, an Army base in Kansas where soldiers were training for combat in World War I (1914-18). Over the next few weeks, more than 1,000 men reported to the camp hospital with the same symptoms, and 38 died.

As thousands of Americans were sent * to Europe to fight in the war that spring, they took the flu with them. It spread rapidly...