When the land was cleared of the school, Hobb's football field, named after former principal Waldo Hobbs, was moved 150 yards south to occupy the former school grounds.

In 1973, another "new" North High School opened at the new location, 1500 James Avenue North.   Hard to believe that it has been 35 years since that move, that is over 1/2 the age of the "old" school it replaced.  After 1976, when the "Lady Polars" began participating in sports at North, the school song, LOYALTY, was altered to reflect both the girls and the boys athletic teams.

With the United States hitting the grim milestone of almost 550,000 deaths from COVID-19 and increasing public recognition that hundreds of thousands of those deaths may have been preventable, we may see renewed references to the terrible toll of the 1918–19 influenza epidemic. These comparisons will be more insightful if we understand whose deaths were (and were not) included in the count of victims during the “Spanish flu.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the value of accurate statistics for setting health policy and educating the public about likely outcomes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic came to public attention, examples from the 1918 influenza have been invoked to explain how to flatten the curve through social distancing, the efficacy of masks, and the advisability of school closings. At the onset of the current pandemic, predictions of hundreds of thousands of US deaths seemed to prompt health officials as well as segments of the public to take the disease more seriously and understand the need for significant mitigation measures.

These predictions illustrate a primary challenge of public health policy as well as messaging, which is the need to encourage people to recognize a threat without generating despair about potential outcomes that may in turn lead to denial or inaction. The graphic warning from a placard displayed on streetcars during the 1918 epidemic in Philadelphia, stating simply, “Spit Spreads Death,” illustrates how public health messaging sometimes requires blunt statements that personal behaviors must change to prevent increased mortality.

In drawing these analogies from past epidemics, however, we also need to recognize that one of the most widely reported facts from 1918–19, the death of 675,000 Americans, is based on limited, inconsistent, and even speculative reports. For health policy makers in 2021, understanding how deaths were counted in this earlier epidemic should provide a useful point of reference for educating the public about the increasing toll of COVID-19, with the goal of convincing people to take measures needed to gain control of the disease.

Unpacking The “Spanish Flu” Mortality Numbers

Any mortality comparisons between these two pandemics in the United States, 2020 and 1918, must differentiate between totals and rates. The current US population, a little more than 330 million, is more than three times larger than the population in 1918, estimated at 105 million. The 675,000 deaths attributed to the influenza epidemic made up 0.64 percent of the total population, a little more than six in every thousand people. By contrast, the more than 500,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 make up about 0.15 percent of the total population, or between one and two in every thousand people. If COVID-19 caused deaths at the same rate as the 1918 epidemic, the total would approach two million. Even the disturbing projections of more than to 600,000 deaths by July 1, 2021, would still remain below the rates recorded in the earlier epidemic.

It is important to recognize that we don’t know precisely how many people died of “Spanish flu.” Measuring influenza deaths is complicated because this disease often contributes to deaths attributed to other primary causes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Pneumonia and Influenza Mortality Surveillance combines two causes into one reporting category. Most reports during the “Spanish flu” anticipated this practice by combining influenza and pneumonia deaths together, thus recognizing that the epidemic produced more deaths than were just attributed to influenza. We see a similar pattern today, as the actual count of pandemic deaths should include far more than those attributed specifically to COVID-19.