October 17, 1918 - Mary continues to improve

For first time in nearly two weeks, Mary was well enough and able to leave her room, but was still confined to upstairs of her home.  Her sister Marguerite seems to be making similar progress. She does not mention her father, who presumably has fully recovered.

As noted in the November 2017 Smithsonian magazine (original sources: America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby, the National Library of Medicine, and the US Census Bureau), 25.8 million Americans were infected with influenza in the 1918-1919 pandemic, and 670,000 died as a result (at a time when the U.S. population was about 103 million).  20% of the flu deaths were in children under 5 years of age.  The life expectancy in the United States dropped by 12 years because of the pandemic.  50% of U.S. military deaths in World War I were caused by influenza.  Among the notable people who died were the co-founders of the Dodge Brothers car company, the mother of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the grandfather of President Donald Trump and Austrian artist Gustav Klimt.  Estimates of worldwide deaths vary but were likely in the range of 50 million.