The Spanish flu was something very distant, an almost forgotten event, doomed to live forever in the shadow of the last year of World War I, with which it coincided. Unfortunately, that has changed. The coronavirus has made us remember all the pandemics that humanity has gone through, and often refer back to it as well. It may not be the most devastating, but it is the most recent. It is the pandemic with which we can most easily identify today, as it happened in "modern times".
The victims she left behind are incomparably more than those left by the coronavirus, as you will see shortly, in the 13 facts that follow. However, it has some elements that are hopelessly reminiscent of today's pandemic - and you will see this in a moment.
Basically, right now:
1. 500 million people were infected, which means that 1/3 of the then world population got sick sometime between 1918 and 1919.
2. If Boris Johnson's coronavirus infection has shown us anything, it is that the virus does not discriminate and does not understand chairs and offices, something that had been confirmed since the distant 1919. In that year, the President of the USA, Woodrow Wilson , fell ill while in Paris and taking part in the Peace Treaty that would formally end World War I. And the next President of the USA, Franklin Roosevelt, will be hit by the Spanish flu.
3. In total, the number of victims is somewhere between 50 and 100 million, a figure that is certainly shocking. You realize the danger of that flu when you read that the chance that a person who contracted it would die was of the order of 2.5%.
4. 75% of the deaths occurred in just 10 weeks in the fall of ’18.
5. In the first year of the pandemic, approximately 675,000 people died in the United States, more than have died in forty years from AIDS in the same country.
6. The flu also killed many celebrities of the time, including baseball player Larry Chappelle, silent film star Myrtle Gonzalez, and former US First Lady Rose Cleveland.
7. He did not distinguish between young and old. Millions of young people died, even a few hours after the first symptoms.
8. The name 'Spanish flu' may have been adopted worldwide, but this pandemic did not start in Spain. It's just that the Spanish government was the first to speak openly about this issue, to make it known, at a time when other countries were silent about it. You see, they were at war with each other and neither country wanted the other to know that they had thousands of sick soldiers in their ranks. Spain was neutral.
9. In reality, no one knows for sure which country the flu originated from. Historians, epidemiologists, everyone has a theory, but no one is 100% sure.
10. In the USA especially the mouths remained closed for a long time. The morale and attitude of the army had to be kept high, they could not be told to "rank, stick". Thus in Philadelphia alone about 13,000 people died.
11. In the USA the health care system was strained, it was on the verge of collapse and the government was forced to order buildings for the patients and hire new staff. Many doctors and many nurses were absent in Europe because of the war.
12. The 'Spanish flu' was a virus related to H1N1, except that it did not come from pigs, but from birds.
13. The flu hit the planet in three waves. The first came in spring, the second in autumn and the third and last in winter.
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