A Pandemic Ships In
Covid-19 era Puerto Ricans who are wearing face masks, contending with closed schools and workplaces, and socially distancing, would feel right at home in 1918 Puerto Rico after the Spanish Flu arrived on the island. According to the 1919 annual report from the Governor of Porto Rico to the U.S. War Department, on June 13, 1918 the Spanish passenger ship Patricio de Satrustegui arrived from Barcelona with thirty cases of influenza on board, five of which still remained in the ship’s hospital. Nobody was quarantined and passengers disembarked freely.
The first to fall ill were pier workers, many of whom lived in Puerta de Tierra, where most of the laborers from the Puerto Rico American Tobacco Company also resided. From there, it didn’t take long to make its way throughout the city. When people from rural areas came to the city for the Fourth of July holiday and to visit troops stationed at Camp Las Casas in San Juan, they carried the disease home with them. This first wave of the flu, however, was relatively mild, primarily characterized by a three-day fever. And, because it coincided with a street sweeper strike in San Juan that saw refuse and garbage accumulating on the streets, many attributed the illness to the city’s temporary unsanitary conditions.
As in the U.S., however, there was to be a second and much deadlier wave. On September 28, the Brazilian ship Benavente was forced to enter the port of San Juan for repairs. It had fifty-nine cases of flu on board, some with serious respiratory complications. The sick were taken off the ship, quarantined in hospital tents, and treated by military doctors. Within a few days, the military doctors spread the illness to troops at Camp Las Casas. Again, relatives visiting recruits and recruits visiting home created an outbreak, this time much more serious.
By the first week in November, the commissioner of health declared an epidemic and took many of the same steps we’re taking today to control it. Even so, the epidemic lasted until mid-February 1919. In all 250,000 people were stricken out of a population of 1.25 million, and 10,888 died. The second wave moved so quickly that at one point,100,000 people were sick at the same time. Let’s hope Puerto Rico fares much better with the Covid Crisis of 2020.
By the way, according to a Washington Post 2003 piece by David Brown, “Spain was a neutral country during World War I. Unlike the belligerents in that conflict, it did not censor news reports, so the Spanish outbreak got wide publicity, ultimately lending its name to both the pathogen and the pandemic itself. Even at the time, however, experts realized the name ‘Spanish flu’ was entirely misleading as an indicator of the germ's origin.”
