New York ¨C My junior and senior years in high school were 1968 and 1969; five decades later, I can still remember some of the main events of that era: the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the bombing of Cambodia, the Apollo 8 spaceflight that orbited the moon, and Woodstock, which I pleaded with my parents to let me attend. (They said no.)
In my personal life, I remember playing on the basketball team, buying my first car, working in my family¡¯s corner grocery store and wishing I had the nerve to ask certain girls out on a date. Here¡¯s what I don¡¯t remember: the pandemic of 1968-1969.
And yet there was one. It was called the H3N2 virus ¡ª less formally, the Hong Kong flu ¡ª and it took a significant toll. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that 1 million people died worldwide, 100,000 in the United States. Conditions in large U.S. cities sound similar to what they¡¯re going through now, with overwhelmed hospital workers, millions of people getting sick and the elderly most likely to die.
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