Since earning its pandemic status, the novel coronavirus has drawn comparisons to the 1918 flu pandemic — not the typical seasonal flu — with regard to its potential. And that’s an unnerving sentiment, considering the numbers cited by state epidemiologist Zack Moore when talking in 2018 about a museum exhibit on the 1918 outbreak.

“World War I claimed about 18 million lives. The influenza epidemic that swept across the world in 1918 claimed the lives of an estimated 50 million people,” Moore said in an N.C. Department of Health and Human Services blog. “One third of the world's population was infected with this virus. Within a few months, it had become one of the deadliest outbreaks in recorded history.”

Here in Winston-Salem, there was a three-month period that, among other things, shut down a church that pre-dated the Declaration of Independence and closed one of the city's economic stalwarts.

A look through the Journal archives — including newspapers from October 1918 while the flu ravaged the county and reporting from decades later in the 1960s and 1970s — paints a gloomy picture. In the Twin City, more than 10,000 people, nearly a quarter of the city’s 40,000 residents, came down with the virulent strain of flu.