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Spanish flu

As Covid-19 threatens to push millions of Americans into poverty, we can look to the past for lessons on how to deal with a pandemic.

The numbers are already grim.  Worldwide, over 27 million have contracted Covid-19; nearly 875,000 have died from it.

Toward the end of World War I, American doctors fought an invisible enemy on the home front — a pandemic that would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history.

Editor's Note: John Barry is the author of The Great Influenza: The Epic

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