"“Influenza generally has a U shaped mortality curve, meaning it looks like a U, but the tops of the U are the most deadly,” Markel said. “But in 1918 it was a W shaped mortality curve and that upside-down part of the W, the V, was young people between ages 18 and 40 dying like flies. That was odd. That was not typical for previous flu pandemics or subsequent ones.” It’s also important to consider population when talking about outbreaks or disasters, said Samantha Montano of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, who studies disasters. In 1918, the world population was much smaller with an estimated 1.8 billion people. Today, there are nearly 8 billion on the planet. Mooney echoed those remarks, saying, “We’re talking about a global population that is sort of smaller than it is now.” He said the death toll from 1918 virus likely had a great impact on the workforce who were unable to work from home or remotely like we can today. “You end up having major structural, economic and social readjustments when you have such a massive death toll like that,” he said. “We have social welfare networks ... people travel around the globe. We have different societies and economies.”"
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Berkeley Lovelace Jr.; “Medical historian compares the coronavirus to the 1918 flu pandemic: Both were highly political”, CNBC, (Sep 28 2020; updated Sep 29 2020)
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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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