WWI letters provide a link
Parallels with COVID-19, Spanish flu found in notes from soldier.
As the news filled up with stories about the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders were issued, Karen Lougheed knew she had seen all this mentioned before. About 15 years ago, the Winter Garden resident had come into possession of some letters written by her grandfather, Crawford Scott. “I thought, wasn’t there something about the Spanish Flu in there?” she said.
A Pittsburgh native, Scott had been drafted after a college deferment to fight in World War I. In October 1918, the peak of the H1N1 outbreak, the young soldier was sent to Fort Thomas in Kentucky to be processed and sent to war.
While the experience we’re living through now feels unprecedented, Scott’s letters to his then-girlfriend (and eventual wife) Minerva shine a light on the similarities people dealt with in the last major global pandemic.
“Shortly after arriving here yesterday the camp was quarantined because of Spanish Influenza,” Scott wrote on Oct. 6, 1918. “There are several cases of it in camp. We are exiled now. No one is allowed in or out.”
“Turns out there was a lot about the flu in there,” said Lougheed.
Scott described an early situation of crowding. In the Oct. 6 letter, he wrote, “Only limited servicemen are being sent to this place and it is overcrowded with them. The barracks in which I sleep contains about 130 cots. It is supposed to accommodate sixty only. The cots are so close we cannot get in them from the side but must jump in from the end.”
Readers today confined to their homes will probably relate to the inertia and boredom in Scott’s letter of Oct. 7. “We are in bed at 9 o’clock and up at six; quite different from my usual habits of rising and retiring,” he wrote.