Pandemic

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">A disease that no one understood laid waste a major American city. Five thousand died in two months, and Memphis was never the same again.</span> </span></p>

<p>During George Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one-tent of  Philadelphians, which was the capital of the young United States.</p>

<p>Toward the end of World War I, American doctors fought an invisible enemy on the home front — a pandemic that would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history.</p>

<p>Masks and "social distancing" are nothing new. Over the centuries, Americans have suffered terribly from smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, pellagra, influenza, polio, and other pandemics.</p>