True, but very few little ones fell ill from the 1918 flu. Usually the flu hits the very old and the very young the hardest. The 1918 flu hit mostly young adults.
I don’t put much stock in the belief that people lived shorter lives then. Much higher infant and child death rates bring the average down fast but doesn’t really speak to actual ages.
I’ve been doing a lot of genealogy research and I’m finding that most males who survived to adulthood in my family were living into their mid 70s and 80s back into the 1500s and 1600s and they were mostly hard living frontier people. I’m seeing lots of women who died in their 30s and 40s but I attribute it to them being pregnant for decades on end. The children were the ones who contributed most to the average. If 5 out of 10 children survived to adulthood, you were doing pretty good. When it comes to men dying young, it looks like sailors took the biggest hit.
the reason is this flu causes the immue system to go into over-overdrive and start attacking healthy parts of the body. that’s why healthy people got nailed hard. good immune systems became too good. that’s what is behind arthritis. ramp it up 100 times.