Stunning Costs that Started at Fort Devens

Reading the Republican newspaper and found this information in their science section.
The source is Harvard College.

“In September 1918, at Fort Devens, outside of Boston, the world’s worst pandemic flu got its start. The Camp hospital, built to house 1200 soldiers, was overflowing from the war injuries with more than 6,000. These previously healthy and fit young men began to feel ill. Within 12-24 hours they were choking to death, their lungs filled with fluid.

Suddenly after the Fort Devens outbreak, 250 people a day were dying in Boston. The epidemic spread to NYC, within a few weeks 21,000 children were orphaned. In less than one year, nearly 1 billion people were infected worldwide. Between 20 million and 40 million eventually died–many or more than have died of AIDS in the past 25 years.

In 1968, another pandemic flu struck, and it killed one million–only a fraction of 1918’s toll–but it cost the economy $70-167 billion. That’s about the cost of the war in Iraq, or of rebuilding after Katrina and Rita.