On March 4th, 1918, a private in the army reported to the Fort Riley base hospital with cold-like symptoms, including a sore throat, fever and a headache.
By that afternoon, over 100 fellow soldiers had reported similar symptoms. This marks what is believed to be one of the first cases reported of the influenza pandemic of 1918 in the United States.
25 miles from Boston
The hospital at Camp Devens and the nearby Boston area were the epicenter of the East Coast wave of the pandemic.
On September 1st, the hospital at Camp Devens was nearly empty, with only 84 out of a possible 1,200 beds occupied. Within days the hospital was completely full.
At the peak of the the first wave of the pandemic 1,542 soldiers reported ill on a single September day, causing the camp to be quickly overrun.
With the majority of the doctors and nurses also sick, the hospital stopped accepting patients and thousands of soldiers were left sick and dying in their barracks.
Army bases across the country are now becoming a hotbed for the virus.
The 1918 flu saw the first use of what we now call telemedicine. People who had access to telephones were able to call their doctors for advice instead of going to the doctor's office or the hospital.
Unfortunately, this was only possible for a short period of time, as many of the telephone operators throughout the country became ill with the flu and many phone systems went down. However, it is a great example of that era's technology and medicine working together.
In Mid-September, the New York Department of Health makes the influenza a reportable illness, like smallpox and typhoid.
This way the local government could do a primitive form of contact tracing to see where the hot spots in the city were.