CNN published a very good article about what happened to the schools and their students during the so-called “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1917-18. Many schools closed. Three large urban districts stayed open because officials believed that children were better off in schools than in their crowded tenements.
The striking point in the article is that the schools were well-supplied with nurses and doctors. The progressive reforms of the era had made schools a healthier place than many of the children’s homes. By contrast, about 25% of our schools today have no nurse, and even more have only a part-time nurse.
While the vast majority of cities closed their schools, three opted to keep them open — New York, Chicago and New Haven, according to historians.
The decisions of health officials in those cities was based largely on the hypothesis of public health officials that students were safer and better off at school. It was, after all, the height of the Progressive Era, with its emphasis on hygiene in schools and more nurses for each student than is thinkable now.
New York had almost 1 million school children in 1918 and about 75% of them lived in tenements, in crowded, often unsanitary conditions, according to a 2010 article in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Surgeon General and the US Public Health Service.
“For students from the tenement districts, school offered a clean, well-ventilated environment where teachers, nurses, and doctors already practiced — and documented — thorough, routine medical inspections,” according to the Public Health Reports article.
The city was one of the hardest and earliest hit by the flu, said Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. He was a co-author of the 2010 Public Health Reports article.
“(Children) leave their often unsanitary homes for large, clean, airy school buildings, where there is always a system of inspection and examination enforced,” New York’s health commissioner at the time, Dr. Royal S. Copeland, told the New York Times after the pandemic had peaked there.
The “Spanish flu” did not start in Spain. It very likely started in Kansas at Fort Riley. Spain was the first country not to censor news of the pandemic, so it was called the Spanish flu.
Boston refused to close schools during the 1918 flu. Then children began to die.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/08/11/1918-flu-schools-closing-boston-coronavirus/
“The “Spanish flu” did not start in Spain. It very likely started in Kansas at Fort Riley.”
Having read three books on the pandemic since our own pandemic, I can attest to the idea that there is widespread disagreement to the origin of the 1918 pandemic. Hoskins County in western Kansas comes in for a bit of scrutiny from a lot of writers due to records a doctor left who worked there. A Canadian historian has reviewed descriptions of Chinese workers falling ill on their round the world trip to work building trenches on the Western Front for Britain.
All agree, however, that the presence of the front itself was the catalyst that propelled the pandemic into what it became. Countries were more afraid of losing the war than they were losing their citizens. This fact led to widespread rejection of militarism in the 1920s, especially in the winning nations. When Great Britain, France, and the United States were reticent in confronting Hitler, it was partly because of the experience of the terrible war and the deadly pandemic that followed it. The pandemic would never have spread so much without the war and its movement of people.
and modern-day war endlessly creates the refugees who move, along with their livestock, across borders and into different lands: science has long been warning that climate change and war will cause population movements which will be the source of pandemics
There is another important fact that sets 1918 apart from this pandemic. School enrollment of 5 to 19-year-olds was about 60 percent. By 1991, school enrollment of 5 to 19-year-olds was 93.1 percent. Table 9 on page 36 shows the number of students in public schools. For 1918-19, the total was 21,216,000. That number is more than 50 million today of 5 to 19-year-olds.
If you click the link, scroll down to TABLE 2 on page 14.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-ghislaine-maxwell-trump/i-wish-her-well-trump-comments-on-arrest-of-epstein-aide-ghislaine-maxwell-idUSKCN24M328
Well, this is what I have to say. I am a kindergarten teacher in Ghana and I think that we stayed at home far too long. 3 weeks ago one of my KG2 boys got drowned in a water body. He went together with a class 2 boy to catch birds and that boy too drowned. My point is, if school was in session they wouldn’t have had the chance of going to look for birds around the water body.
Even though, the government has given out free workbooks for the kids to use at home, they still roam about.