Gunnison, Colorado: The Town That Dodged The 1918 Influenza Pandemic
'Gunnison, Colorado: the town that dodged the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.' A century on, what can we learn from how US mountain community dealt with viral outbreak. The Guardian, March 1, 2020.
In late 1918 the world’s greatest killer – Spanish flu – roared towards Gunnison, a mountain town in Colorado.
The pandemic was infecting hundreds of millions of people in Europe, Africa, Asia and across the United States, overwhelming hospitals and morgues in Boston and Philadelphia before sweeping west, devastating cities, villages and hamlets from Alaska to Texas. Gunnison, a farming and mining town of about 1,300 people, had special reason to fear. Two railroads connected it to Denver and other population centers, many badly hit. “The flu is after us” the Gunnison News-Champion warned on 10 October. “It is circulating in almost every village and community around us.”
What happened next is instructive amid a new global health emergency a century later as the world struggles react to the emergence of a new coronavirus. Gunnison declared a “quarantine against all the world”. It erected barricades, sequestered visitors, arrested violators, closed schools and churches and banned parties and street gatherings, a de facto lockdown that lasted four months. It worked. Gunnison emerged from the pandemic’s first two waves – by far the deadliest - without a single case. It was one of a handful of so-called “escape communities” that researchers have analysed for insights into containing the apparently uncontainable.
“Gunnison’s management of the influenza situation, one hallmarked by the application of protective sequestration, is particularly impressive when one considers that nearly every nearby town and county was severely affected by the pandemic,” the University of Michigan Medical School said in a 2006 report for the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. “The town of Gunnison was exceptional.”
Now it is the turn of coronavirus to race around the world, rattling governments and stock markets and prompting a desperate scramble to contain and control. Tourists stuck in Spanish hotels, Italian streets eerily empty, schools shuttered in Japan, pilgrimages to Islam’s holiest sites banned, international sporting fixtures suspended – a multiplying list of measures amid confusion over how to respond. The experience of a small town in the Rockies at the end of the first world war does not provide a failsafe blueprint for a different disease in a far more populous, and far more interconnected era. It does however offer tantalising nuggets about about eluding a cataclysm that infected about a third of the global population and killed between 50 million and 100 million people.
Instead of face masks and anti-bacterial hand gels, Gunnsion relied on the guidance and authority of local newspapers, doctors and police – a trust in institutions that may now seem quaint – and on people’s capacity for patience. And on luck...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/01/gunnison-colorado-the-town-that-dodged-the-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic
- Hospital patients in Colorado, 1918.
- More: 'Colorado’s other pandemic: The 1918 flu and the lessons learned — or maybe not — for coronavirus,' Aside from some quick action in Gunnison, cities and towns across the state struggled as the flu pandemic of 1918 ran its deadly course. https://coloradosun.com/2020/03/05/colorado-influenza-pandemic-1918/
…"One notable exception: the town of Gunnison. Authorities there almost entirely shut themselves off from the outside world, even though trains stopped there regularly. Not only did the town impose rules that helped it largely dodge the disease that ravaged other nearby rural areas, but it also became a case study for researchers at the University of Michigan under contract with the Department of Defense to examine how a few scattered communities managed to avoid the 1918 pandemic.
“They cut people off at the pass, literally,” Leonard says. “They allowed the trains to go through Gunnison, but nobody could get off. If you did get off, they put you in jail.”
- Nurses and children in Colorado wearing masks during the 1918 Influenza epidemic.
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