Filadelfia
Filadelfia. (Ir a Personas. Cosas. Cronología. Geografía. Fuentes.)
La gripe devió agravarse con la llegada de marineros de Boston y el desfile de fines de septiembre:
Three hundred sailors from Boston landed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on September 7; on the 19th the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that 600 sailors and marines had been hospitalized with the flu. It should have been apparent to city officials that a potential crisis loomed. In Massachusetts the flu had spread rapidly from military encampments to the public at large. Medical practitioners in Philadelphia called for a quarantine, but Wilmer Krusen, director of the city’s Department of Public Health and Charities, declined. There was recent precedent for such action: Quarantines were regularly enacted during a terrifying polio epidemic in 1916. But that was in peacetime. No civilian deaths from flu had been reported locally, and a Liberty Loan parade — perhaps the largest parade Philadelphia had ever seen — was scheduled for the end of the month. A quarantine would only cause panic, and the city would most certainly not meet its quota of war-bond sales.
Every American seemingly had a personal stake in winning the war. Even children were eager to do their bit. Anna Milani, who was a child in Philadelphia during the epidemic, remembered the rhyme she and her friends would sing in the street:
Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching I spied Kaiser at the door We’ll get a lemon pie And we’ll squash it in his eye And there won’t be any Kaiser anymore
The parade stepped off as planned on September 28 with marching bands, military units, women’s auxiliaries and Boy Scout troops. Some 200,000 spectators thronged the two-mile-long parade route in a show of civic pride. Three days later, 635 new civilian cases of flu, and 117 civilian deaths from the disease and its complications, were reported in Philadelphia.
