Another Flu outbreak like that would sure cut pension costs in the public and private sectors.
Maybe that is exactly what the progressives want. To reduce the population and then create their version of Utopia.
If President Wilson had just delayed the deployment of troops to Europe during that initial outbreak of the Spanish flu in Kansas during World War I, the death toll would have been a tiny fraction of the 50 million that subsequently died, according to what I’ve read online.
I lost an uncle and his wife (both of whom I never met) to that killer flu. They were in their early twenties and had never been sick in their lives besides a couple of common colds.
They visited my Dad while he was in a hospital recovering from serious injuries as a young soldier. About a week later they died. Their surviving family wisely asked for them to be placed in coffins and sealed with no viewing at the funerals or goodbyes from the survivors in the funeral home.
This is within the living memory of people I knew growing up.
It was not a joking matter. I knew old men and women who would still shudder talking of it, when they talked. My grandfather talked of people dropping dead over night. He was a hard man, and did not flinch from much, but memories of that time would leave him quiet and haunted.
If something like this hits, you would see society shutting down. We were much more independent then, and being cut off for weeks was considered normal. Now people will riot if they lose wifi.
My wife and I normally get our flu shots the first week in November.
We will be dropping by our doctor’s office this afternoon for yearly flu shots.
Later there might not be room for flu patients in hospitals if there are hospitals.
I think in my family 3 people died of this, which is kind of astonishing.
Here is a current article on Spanish flu and it’s origins.
“Writing in the January issue of the journal War in History, Humphries acknowledges that his hypothesis awaits confirmation by viral samples from flu victims. Such evidence would tie the disease’s origin to one location.
But some other historians already find his argument convincing.
“This is about as close to a smoking gun as a historian is going to get,” says historian James Higgins, who lectures at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and who has researched the 1918 spread of the pandemic in the United States. “These records answer a lot of questions about the pandemic.””
Actually the second go around that was really deadly killed younger, healthier people by kicking the immune system into overdrive and overwhelming the body from within. It’s called a Cytokine storm. Older people don’t have such a good immune system so it wasn’t as virulent.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm
50 million in a century? Pfft. Collectivist governments have killed twice that in the same amount of time, and yearn for more.
Another flu outbreak like that one would kill our economy and probably contributed to the great depression.
The old people and kids survived, the 20-40 year olds died.
It killed my grandfather.