1 quote found
"The similarities between the Wilson and Trump administration and the ways in which they handled the 1918 and the 2020 pandemics is uncanny. President Woodrow Wilson didn't issue one public statement about influenza even as hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying. As World War I was winding down, he stubbornly refused to halt troop mobilizations, thereby allowing infections to spread both here and abroad. Both men, at least on the surface, had an obsession that kept them from being interested in the pandemic- for Wilson it was the war and for Donald it was the economy. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the 1918 pandemic is the silence that followed. In some ways it's as if it never happened. The only account in literature I could find is a short story by Katherine Anne Porter. Perhaps the tragedy got swallowed up by the crisis of the world war before and the catastrophe of the Depression after. Or perhaps the totality of the loss, 725,000 dead, more than we've lost today, and a much larger percentage of the population, made it impossible to process."