Question

Did New York City Botch the 1918 Flu Epidemic? The Debate Still Rages (can I get a 200 work please)

On February 19th, 1881 — during one of the coldest winters on record — a headline in The New York Times spoke of an “Unusual Prevalence of Contagious Diseases” that year.

In just a few short months, the city had been afflicted with 550 deaths from diptheria, 88 deaths from smallpox, 508 deaths from scarlet fever, 76 deaths from measles plus dozens of cases of typhus fever and whooping cough.

By March, prominent politicians and doctors had had enough. A public meeting was called at Cooper Union, where they accused city officials of not providing essential services and creating “the dirtiest city in the universe” due to neglect that was akin to murder.

It was in that brutal winter that Harper’s Weekly published this etching, titled “A Warning Light.”

At the time, the Statue of Liberty was still under construction. New Yorkers could only imagine what her face would look like. Here, a beacon of hope becomes a symbol of fear. Lady Liberty’s skeletal face admonishes immigrants as they arrive: “New York: Leave All Hope Ye That Enter,” the supposed inscription on the gates of Hell.

As one of the biggest, most densely populated and heavily-travelled cities in the world, New York has always been a city embattled by contagious disease. As a result, the city also boasts one of the world’s finest public health departments to counter these microbial attacks.

Over the next few months, in collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Academy of Medicine, WNYC will examine the intersection of infectious disease and urban life, past and present.

Answer 1

1918 was the year when New York was first hit by the contagious flu the spanish flu.,back then improper handling of the cases and lack of supervision,isolation measures lead to a massive outbreak taking lifes about 20000 people only in newyork.Had proper isolation and quarantine measures had been taken the authorities could have flatten the curve and broke the chain of spread of the flu .Improper handling and lack of recording has affected the management of the pandemic outbreak in 2020 once again making them clueless of what has to be done to reduce the spread of the pandemic.with confusion in the air on what to do ?how to quarentine ?where to social distance ? the disease made its way in to the City that claims to have advanced medical facilties and once again began rising the death tolls .As the proverb says a stitch in time saves nine had the city carefully handled the epidemic in 1918 it would have been an easy go during the 2020 pandemic reducing its severity among its citizens