My mother’s family was born and raised in Arpaia, a small town in Italy on the Appian Way. The town is surrounded by hills. It’s history dates back to the Roman Empire, when it was a stopover for travelers between Rome and southern Italy. Near the end of WWI, at the time the 1918 influenza pandemic arrived in Arpaia, my grandmother had five young children. She was determined to protect them from exposure to the flu. To do so, each morning after breakfast she prepared a lunch for each and sent them to play in the hills that bordered Arpaia. There they would be protected from any townspeople who had influenza. As a result, no one in the family contracted the flu. The many hills in the area provided ideal refuge. The concept of social distancing was obvious to my grandmother.
The 1918 influenza was the most severe pandemic in recent history. About 500 million people became infected with the virus worldwide. Mortality in healthy people was exceptionally high. The number of deaths is estimated to be about 50 million worldwide. Are there lessons to be learned from it? Cities in the U.S. that ordered social distancing in 1918-1919 fared better than those that did not. We do not know how many deaths resulted because people underestimated the severity of the virus and ignored social distancing. This is a serious concern during the present pandemic where the importance of social distancing is competing with concerns about the shrinking economy and the demands of a restless population to get back to normal.
