I was doing some reading over the 1918 flu, and came to this one story that had occurred around the Baltimore area. Some guy came home in the late afternoon with a severe headache and aching pain...told the wife he was going to bed. Around sun-up, she tried to wake him, and he was dead. She didn’t want to alarm the two kids and just told them to go off to school. By mid-morning, she had a headache and bodyache. When the kids came home from school....she was dead.
If you read through the historical accounts, urban areas were the hardest hit. Rural areas were much less so.
It’s generally speculated that large numbers of people died and simply weren’t reported in the press, or noted dead in the 1920 Census.
Research on the cause of the Pandemic of 1918-22 revealed that the agent was not a bacteria but a “filterable virus”. The research on the causative agent of the influenza led to the discovery of DNA.
I think rural seemed lower because of poor record keeping and contact. My maternal grandmother survived it while losing 3 family members. They were in the mountains on the VA/W.VA border.
Aside to that, I’d be curious as to how people alive now who survived it look/are. She turned 100 in December and she is in outlier good shape for that age.