Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, took a personal tact on Wednesday as she made her latest plea to the American public to practice social distancing.
Birx noted that her grandmother Leah lived with a lifetime of guilt, because she caught the flu at school and, in turn, infected her mother.
Leah’s mother, who had just given birth, died of the flu — one of an estimated 50 million worldwide who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, Birx said. “She never forgot that she was the child that was in school that innocently bought that flu home,” Birx said of her grandmother, who was 11 at the time. “This is why we keep saying to every American: You have a role to protect each and every person that you