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Originally Posted by coffeebean
Has the flu EVER stressed our health care system like Covid has? Just wondering.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby
The plague did. The flu did not.
And here's some really nifty news:
COVID-19, all strains from beginning in late 2019 til now, have caused or contributed to the death of more people who died from the BIG Spanish influenza (or complications of the Spanish flu) epidemic of 1918.
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So the flu pandemic in 1918 did NOT stress the health care system at the time like Covid has done? I would love to see the documented basis for that assertion, when you compare the medical care available then versus now, and that the flu pandemic of 1918 killed 1 in every 150 people versus Covid which has killed 1 in 500. Here is a link to an article on
CNBC that was published today with that data. Now I am going to undercut my own use of the data with this article as a reference, although the numbers cited from the article are consistent with what I have read in the past. Why am I undercutting the reference? The article was written by a Berkeley Lovelace Jr. and is entitled "
Covid is officially America’s deadliest pandemic as U.S. fatalities surpass 1918 flu estimates". As you will see, the article title and the facts don't match up.
Reading through the article and not just the headline the author includes: "In 1918, for example, the U.S. population was less than a third of today’s with an estimated 103 million people living in America just before the roaring 1920s. Today, there are nearly 330 million people living in the U.S. That means the 1918 flu killed about 1 in every 150 Americans, compared with 1 in 500 who have died from Covid so far."
A pandemic which,
by the author's own data, killed more than 3 times as many people (based upon the population size) was less deadly than Covid? So no, this is not the "deadliest pandemic" but it appears that the headline was more important than the facts. Had the title indicated that more people died than the Spanish flu, that would have been accurate based upon the presented data.