If you're having trouble imagining the great Spanish flu of 1918, this description from "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry might help:

"Death itself could come so fast. Charles-Edward Winslow, a prominent epidemiologist and professor at Yale, noted, 'We have had a number of cases where people were perfectly healthy and died within 12 hours.' "

Or maybe this, paraphrased from "The Plague of the Spanish Lady," by Richard Collier:

"In Rio de Janeiro, a man asked medical student Ciro Viera Da Cunha, who was waiting for a streetcar, for information in a perfectly normal voice, then fell down, dead; in Cape Town, South Africa, Charles Lewis boarded a streetcar for a three-mile trip home when the conductor collapsed, dead. In the next three miles six people aboard the streetcar died, including the driver."

If, like me, you are getting a bit tired of the flu! flu! flu! hyperventilations in the media, here are some things to consider:

Pandemics are among the toughest tests any public official can face, because they are so difficult to predict. On the one hand, you have the grim reaper version of musical chairs that turned 1918 into something Stephen King would have trouble describing with proper horror. On the other, you have 1976, the year President Gerald Ford was so certain we were headed for a swine flu plague that he convinced Congress to fund a nationwide inoculation program, complete with terrifying television ads about how carelessly people could spread trouble ("Betty's mother gave it to her best friend, Dottie. But Dottie had a heart condition and she died. But before she died, Dottie gave it to her girlfriend, her mailman, the paperboy and the vet when she went to pick up her chihuahua," was the cheery message of one).

A grand total of one person died from swine flu that year. However, many more than that died of complications from the vaccine.

Politically, a suspected pandemic is like a tightrope over snapping alligators. You walk it carefully, at your own peril. Ford was criticized for overreacting with a cure that was worse than the disease. But what type of criticism would he have endured if he hadn't urged inoculations and an influenza tsunami had washed over the land?