The Premonition: A Pandemic Story Highlight

In just five weeks in the fall of 1918, twelve thousand people died. Corpses were stacked like cordwood outside the city morgue; corpses rotted in the streets. Philadelphians closed schools and banned public gatherings and wore masks—and suffered the highest death rate in the country. That’s why everyone now thought that social distancing was a waste of time. But what struck Carter now was how slow Philadelphia’s leaders had been to respond, even after they knew a deadly virus was racing out of control in their city. Yet he also saw that other cities had had radically different outcomes.