It took Boston and Massachusetts several weeks to even begin to take measures to defend their citizens against the pandemic. Some news of Spanish influenza had seeped through from Europe during the summer. Private Thomas L. Roberts wrote home to Fairhaven that he was recovering from pneumonia: “If I had been a whiskey drinker, I would have been a goner.” But little of such news had been received. Bostonians were robustly healthy: despite a jump of 12,000 in the city's population in a year, the number of deaths in the first eight months of 1918 was less than in the corresponding months of 1917. Anyway, influenza seemed unimportant compared with the news on the front pages of the city's newspapers in August and September. Suffragette agitation was rising as a Senate vote on the franchise for women drew near. Eugene V. Debs was on his way to conviction and jail under the Espionage Act. The carmen of the Middlesex and Boston Street Railway struck at the end of August, leaving thousands to walk. Congressman James A. Galivan accused his opponent in the primaries, ex-Mayor James Michael Curley, of having accepted thousands of dollars from the former German ambassador. Russia, called “Bolshevikia” by the Boston Evening Transcript, was in the news every day. On September 4 the papers carried the announcement of Major General William A. Graves's arrival in Vladivostok to take command of American troops in eastern Russia.

On the last day of August 106 sailors at Commonwealth Pier reported sick with influenza and Babe Ruth pitched a three-hitter against the Philadelphia Athletics and banged out a long double to win the American League pennant for the Boston Red Sox.