The 1918 influenza pandemic killed 50 million people and infected approximately 500 million people, or 30% of the world’s population. It disproportionately affected/killed people between 25-40 years old, unlike other flu pandemics and COVID-19, which preferentially kill the very old and young. Philadelphia was hit harder than most US cities, with an estimated death toll of 20,000 (including an estimated 12,000 people in one month). On September 19, 1918, influenza came to Philadelphia aboard a British merchant ship docked at the city’s Navy Yard; within days, 600 sailors became ill. Because of the rapid death rate, cemeteries could not keep up. The dead were piled in sheds and on open ground. The streets of Philadelphia’s “poorer sections” were described as “reeking with the smell of putrefying corpses” and deaths there may not have been systematically reported. The unusual age distribution of influenza deaths has led scholars to assume it was an “equal-opportunity killer.” This assumption, however, has not been fully evaluated in past studies.

Therefore, our hypothesis is: Given that poor, working-class, and marginalized populations have suffered disproportionately from other documented pandemics, we plan to explore primary data from the 1918 influenza pandemic in Philadelphia to identify patterns of illness and death from influenza in African-American and immigrant neighborhoods.

To study this, our team created a database of a sample of Philadelphia residents who died from influenza in 1918 and 1919 and analyzed the demographic data for qualitative patterns. We used primary and secondary resources including death certificates, Philadelphia City directories, Ancestry Library, and Philadelphia City Censuses. We recorded fifteen pieces of data. We created a second database to assess the population composition of Philadelphia’s 48 Wards regarding race and nation of birth. We also performed research on various ethnic neighborhoods, ethnic communities, and institutions in Philadelphia in the early twentieth century. 

The demographic data of this sample of 2,409 people who died of influenza in 1918-1919 (approximately 12% of the total number who died) from the 48 Wards of Philadelphia was as follows: Age: 29.6 ± 17.3 years, range: 0-98 years, 56.7% male, 43.3% female, and Race: 90.0% white, 8.3% African-American, 0.2% Asian, and 0.3% Latino. The greatest number of deaths occurred in October 1918 (70%). There was no obvious geographical pattern in the influenza mortality rates within the city, with the outlier being Ward 38. In examining the mortality percentages, there was a suggestion that immigrant and African-American residents had higher death rates than native-born residents. 

In summary, the Philadelphia population that died of influenza is consistent with worldwide findings that many of the victims were young and male and the death rate followed an episodic pattern. This sample suggests that African-American and immigrant populations were more adversely affected by influenza than their white, native-born counterparts: their death rates were higher. This finding, in addition to the ward disparities, requires further and more extensive study.