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Dr. Shirley Fannin on: Enhancing the Spread
Dr. Shirley Fannin Listen in Real Audio

In 1918 whatever we were doing was doing not much more than enhancing the spread. Viruses are such tiny particles; they are spread very efficiently, so that, you know, for instance, if you're in the front of a room full of people and you have influenza and you're coughing, the virus spreads in the air and you probably are going to infect or have the potential for infecting up to 50% of that audience, just because there are so many millions of the viruses and because they spread out through the air very effectively, then all a person has to do is breathe in one of varions, uh, to get infected. Well, imagine, uht, a barracks with hundreds of people breathing each other's air back and forth and ventilation was not very well known or understood at the time. Just the rapidity of the spread - add that to the virus with an incubation period of one to three days at best, or at worst and maybe even shorter than that, with this virus. So you add that the rapidity of spread, the efficiency of spread, the rapidity of onset of symptoms and then add to that virulence, where people literally got pneumonia within a day or two that wiped out their lungs so they couldn't breathe anymore and you have a setting for a horrible, horrible dramatically horrible a situation round every hospital, even every household.

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