If you have anyone in your life who’s old enough to remember, there was a time, in the first half of the 20th century, that might draw comparisons to life today.
There was fear, uncertainty and lots of concern for public health. It wasn’t the novel coronavirus, of course, the current pandemic sweeping the globe.
It was an epidemic called paralytic poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis -- perhaps best known as polio. In fact, polio was once one of the most feared diseases in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which goes on to say online that in the early 1950s, before polio vaccines were available, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis each year.