The Speed of Spread

I have opened my presentation slides on pandemics (nearly 400 slides) to find this small subset. This is a graphic representation of how quickly the Spanish Flu spread across the US in 1918 in just a few weeks. Remember, we didn’t have air travel at the time, so long distance travel was by train and recall that the Model T Ford had only come on the market in 1908, so travel by automobile was still relatively new. This is a good illustration of how quickly things can move through the US, but when you think about how much easier and quicker transportation is today, it’s likely things will spread much more rapidly.