San Francisco's bubonic plague epidemic has eerie parallels to modern day
It was only in retrospect that San Franciscans remembered they started seeing dead rats — far more than the usual number — around the streets of Chinatown in January 1900.
The city was dirty, though, a maze of muddy, unpaved streets and leaky sewage pipes, so most thought little of it.
One of the few who did was Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun, the chief quarantine officer of the Marine Hospital Service on Angel Island. Though not yet 40, he was one of America’s brightest epidemiological minds and the founder of the nation’s Hygienic Laboratory. He’d been fretting for years that the United States was on the brink of the first bubonic plague epidemic in its history — and with good reason.
Plague was circulating in Asia, recently taking 6 million lives in India. Because of San Francisco’s position as America’s biggest Western port, Kinyoun expected the city to see plague cases before any other.
He instituted a new policy: All ships from Asian or Hawaiian ports must be inspected before disembarking in San Francisco. The reaction from California’s businessmen and newspapers was dismissive. They accused Kinyoun of overstepping his authority and waved away any suggestion of a potential outbreak.
“San Francisco is plague-proof,” the Examiner boasted in February 1900.
“It is a disease peculiar to the Orient and seldom, if ever, attacks Europeans… There is absolutely no danger of the plague ever getting here,” echoed Navy Surgeon General W.K. Van Reypen in a remarkable effort to either erase or forget the Black Death epidemic that killed up to 60 percent of Europe’s population in the 1300s.
https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/San-Francisco-Chinatown-plague-1900s-15188267.php