[quote=spdrun]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.[/quote]
one BIG difference is in 1918 a person could go from healthy to dead in 12 hours (watch the first minute or so of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE)
anyway I’m not an MD but growing up was made aware of various aspects of public health and have a gut feeling that covid-19 in the grand scheme of things so far hasn’t been as bad as the 1918 spanish flu
to listen to what actual exerts have to say on the topic, there is an interesting discussion/podcast of “virologists”
long story short from what I gather, the faster the whole world gets the existing vaccines the better,… this is because there is an ever present danger of virus mutations becoming more contagious/virulent
consider that in china (about a year ago) there was a paper that said the odds of someone becoming infected in a house hold where someone had covid-19 was about 20%,… I point this out because consider what happens if the virus mutation changes the odds of someone becoming infected in a house hold where someone had covid-19 mutation was about 40%
truth is we’re not anywhere near the end of a long dark tunnel simply because most of the global population isn’t going to get a vaccine by summer,… and the danger many are not considering is antibiotic-resistant strains of staph bacteria may be spreading between pigs raised in factory farms
