Editing 1918 Influenza Epidemic (section)

== The Liberty Loan Parade ==

The decision that made Philadelphia's epidemic uniquely deadly was the choice to proceed with a massive Liberty Loan parade scheduled for September 28, 1918. Despite warnings from Dr. Krusen and other health officials that mass gatherings would spread the disease, civic and military leaders decided the parade must go on. The fourth Liberty Loan campaign was crucial to financing the war, and authorities feared that canceling the parade would damage morale and bond sales. Over 200,000 people lined Broad Street to watch the parade, crowding together in exactly the conditions that facilitated virus transmission.<ref name="kolata">{{cite book |last=Kolata |first=Gina |title=Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It |year=1999 |publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux |location=New York}}</ref>

Within seventy-two hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia's thirty-one hospitals was filled. Within a week, 2,600 people were dead. The city that had celebrated in the streets was now overwhelmed by sickness and death on a scale that paralyzed normal functions. The parade did not cause the epidemic—the virus was already present and spreading—but it dramatically accelerated transmission and concentrated deaths in the weeks immediately following. Philadelphia's per capita death rate from influenza became the highest of any major American city, and the parade was later cited as a textbook example of how not to respond to an epidemic.<ref name="barry"/>