COVID has probably killed 600,000 people in the US.
Spanish Flu killed about 675,000. With population in 1918 being 1/3 of what it is today, this would be equivalent to 2 million.
This being said, say half of those people could have been saved using modern healthcare and antibiotics — maybe Spanish Flu would have only killed a million people with modern medicine.
Also, people were MORE crowded in 1918. Cities were actually more densely populated … Manhattan had a population 1.5x that of its present population, even though there were fewer housing units (many apartment buildings were built in the 20s and 30s!). We were coming off a war, so soldiers were coming home packed into troop ships. There wasn’t as much ability to “work from home.”
So despite lack of social distancing and lack of modern medicine, Spanish Flu only killed 3x the number of people as COVID did today. And COVID is far from done with us. If COVID had emerged in 1918, I suspect it would have been as bad (or worse) than the Spanish Flu.
