San Jose Inside Recalls Spanish Flu

As the novel coronavirus has raged throughout the United States over the past few months, killing more than 74,000 people stateside as of May 6, Americans have looked to history for times the country faced similar peril.

One place in the history books that’s gotten much attention over the past few months: the 1918-19 global pandemic known as Spanish Flu, thought to have killed as many as 100 million people before dying down sometime in the 1920s.

As Geoffrey Dunn recounts in a lengthy history published May 6 at San Jose Inside, Santa Clara County and other parts of the region were not immune from the influenza outbreak roughly a century ago.

The article is part familial history, with Dunn noting that his mother was born in Santa Cruz in 1915 and was part of an Italian fishing family.

Dunn goes through newspapers archives in the piece, mentioning a Santa Cruz Evening News article from the fall of 1918 that noted how prevalent the outbreak was in Italian fishing communities. Later in the article, Dunn writes:

“As I read through the papers of local newspapers from a century ago garnering this historical record, I was startled by how many names I recognized and how many people I actually knew while growing up as a kid in the region many decades later.

“I hadn’t realized that my mom’s entire family—and so many in the Italian fishing community in Santa Cruz that had nourished me when I was young—had been stricken with the influenza. How my life would have been irrevocably altered had they died.”

Other parts of the article draw parallels with COVID-19. Dunn notes the same kind of opposition a century ago to wearing masks in public or practicing prolonged social distancing as has been seen from some corners in recent weeks.

Read the piece on San Jose Inside.