WASHINGTON — Sen. Mitch McConnell’s earliest childhood memory is the day he left the polio treatment center at Warm Springs, Georgia, for the last time.

He was a toddler in 1944, when his father was deployed to World War II, his mother relocated the family to her sister’s home in rural Alabama and he came down with flu-like symptoms. While he eventually recovered, his left leg did not. It was paralyzed.

Two years later, after shuttling young McConnell to and from the center where President Franklin Roosevelt received polio care, his mother was told that day that her young son would be able walk into his life without a leg brace.

She immediately took the 4-year-old shopping for a new pair of shoes.

More than 70 years later, Senate Majority Leader McConnell walked into the U.S. Senate to pass a sweeping coronavirus rescue package — and shutter the chamber for the foreseeable future — as another dangerous flu-like virus fills the nation with anxiety, quarantines and unimaginable disruptions to American life.

“Why does this current pandemic remind me of that? I think No. 1 is the fear,” said McConnell in an interview with The Associated Press. “And the uncertainty you have when there’s no pathway forward on either treatment or a vaccine and that was the situation largely in polio before 1954.”

The two crises bookend McConnell’s years, making the Kentucky Republican an unexpected voice of personal experience and reflection in what he calls these “eerie” times.

It’s an unusual role for the famously guarded leader, who rarely says more when less will do, and relishes an image as a sly political tactician.

But as more than 18,000 people in the country have died from the coronavirus, the echoes are all too familiar. So too is the solution, as he sees it, to care for the nation’s sick and produce treatments, and an eventual vaccine.

“There’s hope that we’re going to get on top of this disease,” he said, “within a year, year and a half.”

Polio ignited a dreadful fear across the country in those years, especially in summertime. The virus particularly struck children, forcing swift closures of schools and playgrounds and, in the sweltering heat, swimming pools. Towns shuttered, families isolated. Thousands died, others were hospitalized and some left permanently paralyzed or with post-polio syndrome. The Salk vaccine was still years away.

“It was a scary virus,” said Stacey Stewart, president and CEO of March of Dimes, which started as FDR’s National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis but quickly took on the name that reflected the public service call for Americans to donate their dimes for a polio solution.

In the Senate last month, McConnell began linking past to the present “just as soon as it became clear that we were actually endangering each other to be together.”

Senators were self-isolating and one, Rand Paul, also a Republican from Kentucky, announced he tested positive.

With the Capitol all but shuttered, the Senate raced to approve the rescue package. The votes tallied, McConnell adjourned the Senate.

“Let’s continue to pray for one another,” he said. “And for our country.”

As Congress considers the next aid package, he said he wants more money for health care.

“I’ve had a normal life, but I’ve been acutely aware of the disease that I had and the relief that the country had when they found the vaccine,” he said.

“We’re going to get that relief.”