Washington authorities who are preparing for the next flu pandemic acknowledge that the best tools for protecting Americans are the same ones used 88 years ago, in the great flu pandemic of 1918.
Those tools, which met with varying degrees of success, included wholesale home quarantines, school closures and cancellation of public events.
In a two-day workshop this week at the National Institute of Medicine, experts heard from medical historians about what worked, and what didn't, in various U.S. cities in 1918.
New data published at the session indicates that 9 out of 10 Americans say they'd comply with a quarantine.
But large fractions of Americans worry there would be no one to take care of them if they got sick -- and they wonder how they'd manage without a paycheck if they didn't go to work.
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