Texto para a pergunta.
“ SAID TO BE” [“PROVAVELMENTE É”]
BY
STEPHANIE CAREY
Founded in Brooklyn in 1838, the park-like Green-Wood Cemetery was one of the first examples of America’s Rural Cemetery Movement. Decade after decade, clerks carefully recorded each of the dead who passed through its spired gates [portões góticos pontiagudos]. Name, age, address, and cause of death were transcribed in flowing script, year after year, through the Civil War, Gilded Age, and finally, the First World War (the so-called Great War). I’m a volunteer archivist at Green-Wood, with a career in public health. Those entries are more than a list to me. The burial log [registro de enterros] is a treasure trove [valiosa coleção] of epidemiological data that tell the stories of life and death in the metropolitan area.
In the nineteenth century, many of the burials were of children, the entries [anotações] in the ledgers representing grief and loss from diseases unheard of today. Then, young people stopped dying. Improvements in public health – safe drinking water, pure milk, and improved sanitation – were responsible. Child deaths in New York City fell by one-third in the first decade of the twentieth century, and continued falling. By 1917, the burial log began to tell a new story. The very face of death had changed – to an old face.
That made what happened in the fall of 1918 all the more staggering [chocante]. The deadly “second wave” of Spanish influenza struck the city in mid- September. First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of cases per day were reported. The disease hit young adults in the ′ of life, such as the soldiers gathered at nearby camps, particularly hard. Hospitals were swiftly overwhelmed [inundados]. Some 150 field hospitals [hospitais de campanha] were established by the Board of Health throughout the city, in any place that could be found to set up rows of cots [camas portáteis], but especially in the tenements [cortiços].
At its peak in mid-October, almost a thousand people were dying each day of influenza, lobar pneumonia (which could kill a healthy person in a day), or bacterial pneumonia (which destroyed flu-damaged lungs). Whether the burial log said “influenza” or “pneumonia,” all were casualties from the same pernicious virus.
The burial log shows dozens of burials per day – typically people in their twenties or younger. Mildred Sturmpolis, pregnant at eighteen, dies of flu with her unborn baby. Edgar Nystrom, a twenty-year-old Swedish immigrant who came to New York City to find his fortune, is instead buried in a borrowed grave. The funeral of Millie Cuming, newly wed to a prosperous businessman, is held on Armistice Day, three weeks before her thirtieth birthday.
Then, a series of notations hints at a deeper horror. Said to be Anna Kennedy. Said to be James Seward. Those dying at the field hospitals were removed swiftly to make room for the next victims. Others were dying at home amid family members too ill to get out of bed and attend to the niceties [formalidades] of death. Said to be… there was no one, no time, to positively identify the dead. Gatherings [aglomerações] at wakes [velórios] or funerals were discouraged, to prevent further spread of this plague. Graveside services [cerimônias religiosas na sepultura] were perfunctory.
Over 20,000 New Yorkers died of Spanish flu in two months – part of the estimated half-million Americans who died in the epidemic. By Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, officials declared the epidemic over, yet people continued to die of the disease for two more years.
When will the next deadly flu pandemic emerge? Will it be avian flu? Swine flu? There is a worldwide network of epidemiologists racing to anticipate it. It is the stuff of nightmares for public health people like me, as we try to prepare.
Adapted from Natural History, September 2017.
The author of the article most likely believes which of the following?
