Trump isn’t the first president to fall ill from a virus driving a global pandemic

President Donald Trump’s positive COVID-19 test on Friday is not the first virus infection to rock the White House in the middle of a global pandemic.

In 1919, then-President Woodrow Wilson came down with the Spanish flu during the 1918 pandemic.

The Spanish Influenza killed 60 million people as it swept the globe, 675,000 of which were in the United State. Schools and businesses shut down, and cities instituted mask mandates to help slow the spread of the virus — all while World War I raged overseas.

About 500 million people are estimated to have been infected globally, or about one-third of the world’s population, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The president, however, was criticized at the time for ignoring the pandemic, Time reported.

“Wilson wanted the focus to remain on the war effort. Anything negative was viewed as hurting morale and hurting the war effort,” historian John M. Barry wrote in “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.”

The first cases arrived in the U.S. in the spring of 1918. By the fall, the president’s staff had become ill, Time reported.

But it wasn’t until April 1919 — when Wilson traveled to Paris for treaty negotiations with world leaders after the end of WWI — that the virus caught up to the president, according to The New Yorker. Wilson reportedly came down with a cough and fever on the night of April 3.

His sickness progressed so quickly that Wilson’s personal doctor, Cary T. Grayson, initially thought the president had been poisoned, The Washington Post reported.

As his condition worsened, Wilson was kept isolated at a townhouse in Paris, according to The New Yorker.

“Generally predictable in his actions, Wilson began blurting unexpected orders,” A. Scott Berg wrote in his biography, The Post reported.

He became particularly fixated on the furniture, believing certain pieces had mysteriously disappeared “even though nothing had been moved,” The Post reported. Wilson also seemed to think he was surrounded by French spies, according to The New Yorker.

In “The Great Influenza,” Barry wrote that Wilson “became obsessed with such details as who was using the official automobiles,” The Post reported.

Citing an account by Colonel Starling of the Secret Service, Barry described the president as having “sunken eyes” and a “pale and haggard look, like that of a man whose flesh has shrunk away from his face, showing his skull.”

The public, meanwhile, knew nothing about it.

The president’s doctor and staff told reporters Wilson was merely overworked and that the “chilly and rainy weather” in Paris had brought on a cold, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

On April 5, two days after the president started showing symptoms, a report by the Associated Press explicitly denied Wilson had contracted the Spanish Flu, according to the magazine.

Wilson ultimately recovered, but historians say the president was never quite the same.

Howard Markel, a physician and medical historian at the University of Michigan, told CNBC that Wilson went on a tour of the U.S. upon his return from France, during which time he “became thinner, paler and more frail.”

The president had a stroke six months later, and “his wife basically took over the presidency after that,” Markel said, according to CNBC.

First lady Edith Wilson hid her husband’s condition after the stroke, which left him “paralyzed on his left side and partially blind,” Smithsonian Magazine reported.

It was not the first time a president hid his illness — President Grover Cleveland reportedly had surgery for his cancer aboard a yacht in 1893 so the public wouldn’t know.

Wilson ultimately left office in 1921 and died on Feb. 3, 1924.

But there is an important distinction between the two cases, which inflicted presidents more than 101 years apart, Markel told CNBC: “Unlike today, Wilson did not get sick during his reelection.”

“The importance of (Trump) being clear, open and honest — or his doctors — with his health conditions is something I’m skeptical we’ll see,” Markel said, according to the media outlet. “But it is critical.”