To the editor:

Here is an excerpt from Albert Marrin’s book “Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 “ published in 2018. This particular piece deals with how the New York City school system dealt with the pandemic of 1918.

“Most officials played it safe ordering schools closed for a few days, weeks or months. Yet three major cities – New York, Chicago and New Haven, Connecticut – kept their schools open throughout the pandemic. Their reason for doing this were much the same; we will focus on New York because it had the nation’s largest number of pupils.

“The city’s schools served nearly 1 million children, of whom three out of four lived in crowded, rundown tenements. At first, the health officials wanted to follow the rest of the country, closing school until the crisis passed. However, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker (1873-1945), head of the Bureau of Child Hygiene, argued for keeping them open. She asked the health commissioner, Dr. Royal S. Copeland, a simple question: If you have a system where you could examine one fifth of the population of the city every morning and control every person who showed any symptom of influenza, what would it be worth to you?” Copeland replied “That would be priceless.”

“Baker was a bundle of energy. Thanks to her wit and will, schools became havens from influenza. Schools already offered a clean environment, visited by doctors and nurses for routine medical inspections. Now children were forbidden to gather outside before the school day began. Instead, monitors hurried them straight to their classrooms, where teachers checked for telltale symptoms: runny noses, red eyes, sneezing, coughing. Children with any of these symptoms were immediately sent to the nurse’s office for further examination. A school secretary took a sick child either home to be put to bed or directly to a hospital emergency room.

“Baker’s program was an amazing success. It had beaten the odds. When the pandemic finally passed, Dr. Copeland reported “The number of cases of influenza among children of school age was so small as to be negligible. There was no evidence at all, in this age group (6 to 15) that there had been any epidemic of influenza in the city. Elsewhere, things were decidedly different.”

Perhaps it would have been better to have followed the history than the science?

Tom Dorsey

Fort Dodge