From NPR.
This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
For months, people were afraid.
The virus outbreak started out small, but then grew exponentially.
Within days, every part of the country, every part of the world was affected.
Uncertainty and confusion abounded.
Misjudgments about how to fight the pandemic proved catastrophic.
All this rings true today, but it was also true a century ago.
Almost exactly 100 years ago, a new infectious disease swept the world.
My guest this week says the lessons from that outbreak are instructive if we only stop to listen.
Nancy Bristowe is a historian at the University of Puget Sound.
She's the author of American the lost worlds of the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Nancy, thank you for joining me today on hidden brain.
Thank you so much.
Give me a sense of the scale of the 1918 pandemic.
NANCY this was a massive event.
Inside the United States, more than a quarter of Americans were sickened.
By the time the pandemic was through, 675,000 Americans would die.
And the estimates vary for the world, for somewhere between 50 and 100 million people, and a third of people on the globe were likely infected.