"No one really knows how many people died, but the first contemporary estimates put deaths at 21 million worldwide. That estimate is often still quoted, but it was certainly far worse than that. MacFarlane Burnett spent much of his life studying influenza, and he concluded that the worldwide death toll (from the 1918–1919 pandemic) was a minimum of 50 million, possibly 100 million. He may well have been right. If you adjust for population, that could be 300 million today. In three weeks, it killed more people than AIDS has in 24 years. In the U.S., a reasonable estimate starts at 500,000 deaths. Personally, I am inclined toward a higher estimate of 700,000. There was 15–53% morbidity. In San Antonio, over 90% of households had at least one family member with the illness. Most of the deaths occurred in healthy adults. In Army camps, the death toll was routinely over 5%, sometimes as much as 10%, and in some communities as high as 30%."
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John Barry, p.5
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Spanish flu
, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or the 1918 influenza pandemic, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented case was March 1918 in Kansas, United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million t
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