“At first, Philadelphia’s epidemic did not differ from that in other major American cities,” the historian James Higgins writes in Pennsylvania Legacies. “Yet by the first week of October, roughly five weeks into the outbreak, Philadelphia’s mortality rate accelerated in a climb unmatched by any city in the nation—perhaps by any major city in the world.” And that spike is attributed to the patriotic event, one of several Liberty Loan rallies organized in Philadelphia to raise money for the war. This time it was joined by a baneful guest: “The virus, an invisible presence at the parade, had enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity to spread throughout the city and in the coming days announced its presence in a skyrocketing wave of sickness and death.”
Soon hospitals were at capacity, as were the morgues and cemeteries. In a study published in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the incidence curves of the 1918 epidemic in Philadelphia, researchers note that, 72 hours following the parade, all the beds in the city’s 31 hospitals were filled and by “the evening of October 3, the closure of schools, churches, and places of public amusement was adopted by the Philadelphia city council.”
In six weeks, 12,000 were dead. The smell of bodies left to rot in homes while they waited to be removed permeated the streets. The spread of the virus was exacerbated by existing conditions in the city: a booming population drawn by the wartime industries, a density of housing, and a lack of sanitation services and safe drinking water in these working-class neighborhoods.
Adding to the crisis was a shortage of medical staff, as many were abroad in the war effort. As more and more people got sick, the operation of the city ground to a halt. “Thousands of city workers were out sick, including street car drivers, telephone receptionists, shopkeepers, and garbage collectors,” writes the nursing historian Arlene W. Keeling in Public Health Reports. “In the already overcrowded tenement districts, conditions simply got worse. When the nurses also became sick, the situation became critical.”