Today's Tidbit... Polio and NC State's Rapid Response

COVID-19 upended the 2020 college football season with teams canceling, delaying, or reducing their schedules. During and after that season, the aptest comparison was to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which also caused a reshuffling of college football schedules.

However, games were canceled in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s when polio reared its ugly head. Unlike the Spanish Flu or COVID-19, polio was less transmissible and appeared more sporadically. Still, more than five percent of polio cases died in 1952 while the disease crippled others, so each outbreak created significant concern.

Those with active polio infections can transmit the disease for several weeks. Without effective treatments, communities in the 1940s and 1950s depended on isolation and quarantines to stop its spread, and those tactics periodically affected football schedules. Yale, for example, canceled its 1949 game with Fordham after a team member was diagnosed with polio. Teammates underwent twice daily medical exams until health authorities were satisfied they had contained the disease.