Name: The 1918 Flu Pandemic - Emergence - Extra History - #1
Uploaded: 2020-05-13T10:32:38.000Z
Duration: 9 min 21 s
Description: 1918西班牙流感Learn the English Usage: welch,camp,flu,war,institute,rockefeller,epidemic,france,troop,chinese,crammed,measles,world,sick,influenza,pneumonia,medicine,army,america,haskell,halifax,china,surgeon...

The man on the autopsy table  has turned blue.

Welch and his colleagues  lean in as they're opened.

He opens the door and stumbles  around men lying on the floor.

There are no longer  enough beds in the hospital.

Six thousand men, crammed  at a facility meant for 1,200,

We still don't know exactly how  or where it first began infecting humans,

from the trenches of the Western Front to the most remote villages on earth.

It infected 1/3 of the world's population  and killed between 50 and 100 million people.

the low estimate would make it  twice as deadly as World War I,

while the high estimate would mean  it killed more than both World Wars combined.

turning  our interconnected world against us

yet it was also the first pandemic  of the scientific age,

though they lacked  the tools to stop it.

while researchers  couldn't really see viruses,

They had no idea that unlike the bacteria they could see in their microscopes,

the flu was not alive  in any way humans understood it:

Just a bunch of unstable genetic material that possessed a cell, forcing it to pump out

a minority of those new viruses  mutated into something more infectious;

through the randomness of natural selection,

became progressively better at catching  and killing as it passed through each host.

and shattered the sense of invulnerability  that modern medicine had begun to cultivate,

the world did what any person does  when they wake from a dream:

But forgetting  is something we can't afford

because the virus that ravaged  the world in 1918 is still out there;

we still don't know where the pandemic originated,

Military guards are instructed to keep civilians away from the locomotive.

contain the men of the Chinese Labor Corps.

the young, fragile Republic of China  had remained neutral in the first World War.

With so many foreign countries holding territory within its borders,

had used the war  as pretext to move troops

and demand control  of the Chinese government.

To thread the political needle,  China had declared war on Germany.

Hopefully the other allies  will now protect China

from Japanese aggression and give it a seat at the post-war negotiating table.

It may even get  its occupied territory back.

these Chinese recruits are barred from combat.

and traveling overland  to a troop ship in Halifax.

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The 1918 Flu Pandemic - Emergence - Extra History - #1

pandemic

epidemic

disease

spread