It gives perspective.
Posted on 04/03/2020 2:06:36 PM PDT by olepap
It got into the rural areas by the returning soldiers of WWI. Most of them came from and returned to rural areas where they spread the flu. The Spanish Flu made Corona Virus look like a non event. The official count of American dead was 650,000 but Grandpa and others thought it was in the millions. There were almost no doctors, no hospitals, no antibiotics for secondary pneumonia, no medicines, no warm houses, no protection of any kind. It was a slaughter.
My parents had elderly neighbors in the 1960s who lost all five of their children in the Spanish Flu epidemic. All they had left of their children was a portrait that hung in their dining room. It was so sad that their beloved children could not survive.
We seem to have effective treatments now and Univ of Pittsburgh is pretty sure they have an effective vaccine.
My grandfather lost his first wife to the Spanish flu in 1918. He had three young boys to raise. He married my grandmother who was 25 years younger than he was.
They had two daughters, one of which was my mother. When my grandmother died in 1986 she was buried next to my grandfather on his right side. On his left side was the first wife who died in 1918.
There are also a lot more Americans than there were in 1918. For a real comparison you have to look at the fatality rate not the total numbers
In subsequent epidemics, flu measles, polio, ect aspirin was a fine treatment. Aspirin was new in during the Spanish Flu and standard treatments hadn’t been established for it. So some folks succumbed to aspirin toxicity. Aspirin gets a bad rap.
You are absolutely correct. H1N1 swine flu variant from 1917, left the US with our WWI recruits that Wilson was pushing— and because he was pushing, fact is Wilson directed the military to push on and purposely covered up the epidemic, so they could get recruit!. So the boys took it over there and it got loose for real in a “newly exposed” however ALTERED Avian flu (it jumped species again) spread in Spain-who was neutral in WWI and correspondents could report on the spread of the disease- which went way out of control.
Hence the name Spanish flu— the Avian form of the former flue thus also re-infected survivors/herd immunity remainders of the 1917 swine flu, and they brought this variant back to the US-— as the second wave. Avian flu.
Of note,both the 1917 flu and the 1918 Spanish Avian flu, had the feature of cyanosis— purple lips,ears and cheeks caused by lack of oxygen to the heart, caused by the bacterial infection of the lungs blocking uptake of oxygen—leading to a purulent form of pneumonia which finished the patients in the era of no antibiotics.
Both have been re-constructed by a genius molecular pathophysiologist-Jeffrey Taubenberger- Described here along with the history:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html
But it continued to circulate for decades, as a very similar H1N1 virus. Also, it almost immediately infected pigs and became endemic in the swine population, only to resurface after 90 years to cause the 2009 influenza pandemic.
In 2009, persons who had lived through the first decades of the 1918 pandemic H1N1 era, especially those born before about 1950, were substantially protected from the 2009 pandemic virus by having acquired immunity to the antigenically similar H1 or N1 of the 1918 virus, or both, or to the descendant seasonal H1N1 viruses that circulated over subsequent decades. This is because the 2009 H1 gene was a 1918 viral progeny that had survived for more than 90 years, with minimal antigenic drift, in a domestic pig “time capsule.”
—The Mother of All Pandemics Is 100 Years Old (and Going Strong)! (Am J Public Health. 2018 November; 108(11): 1449–1454)
In 1957 and 1968, the H1N1 virus reassorted with avian viruses creating the first H2N2 and later the H3N2 viruses (later generations of the H3N2 pandemic still circulate today). Most of the of the RNA genetics in those reassort ments retained and remained the 1918 version (as now has been studied- so we know a lot more).
The 1918 flu never went away. It’s still killing hundreds of thousands of people every year.
The 2009 H1 gene was a 1918 viral progeny that had survived for more than 90 years, with minimal drift in its makeup, surviving in a domestic pig “time capsule.” And showed up as a major pandemic in 2009-—which obama did nothing about until too late— per our idiot CDC at that time as well as NIH. Same people in fact.
It gives perspective.
It’s a very misleading graphic, because COVID-19 is far from over.
Only if treatment is not put into place.
Granted, a few Governors have tried to block treatment but its been pushed back.
No, it isn’t misleading.
It accurately depicts the empirical evidence.
The Wuhan Bioweapon has been loose for more than four months so far. If it wants to generate deaths that don’t make the panickers look like fools it will have to get on the stick.
everytime I hear how this virus is destroying our economy, I shudder. it is not the virus, it is hyped up paranoid people believing the media and a two bit doctor that is a Hillary supporter.
time for pdjt to see this for what it is and stop the bs
The “Spanish” flu was a novel strain of H1N1, likely a recombination of bird and swine influenza, possibly originating in a farming community in Haskell County, KS in March of 1918 and then spreading to nearby Camp Funston (now Fort Riley) to the soldiers who were then deployed to Europe. It then returned in a more lethal form in the fall of 1918 with troops returning from Europe and another wave in the spring of 1919 – more deadly than the first wave but less deadly than the second before disappearing, either because it mutated or because it ran out fuel, i.e. new people to infect.
It is believed that one of the reasons it killed so many under the age of 40 was that there had been an H1N1 flu strain circulating in the 1870’s that gave many older people at least partial immunity. It should be noted that while it killed those under 40 at a much higher rate, it did infect and kill some older people too.
The “Spanish” flu strain of H1N1 is long gone, it no longer circulates, but if it were to come back you wouldn’t be immune to it. However, if you had been infected with a similar H1N1 strain you might have partial immunity depending on how close its RNA was to the previous strain so that your immune system would recognize it. In the 1970’s when I was in HS, I came down with the “Russian” flu, another H1N1 strain and somewhat a close “cousin” to “Spanish” flu, so I while I might get it (“Spanish” flu) and get sick, I might have some immunity to it, but it’s not really a concern because the exact same strain that caused the 1918-19 flu pandemic is not coming back.
Another thing it understand is that you don’t become immune to a virus through heredity. In other words, if your grand or great grandparents contracted “Spanish” flu and lived, that would do jack squat for you. The only people who would be completely immune from the exact same “Spanish” flu strain of H1N1 would be the people who contracted it and survived back in 1918-19 and there are not many of those folks still living.
Actually, my father was 9 at the time and his entire family of 10 got the flu and all survived.
And they didn’t know anyone who died
Just saying
I don’t think it is a VERY misleading graphic, as with viewing any graphical display of data, you need to keep various things in mind, one is the length of the pandemic in this case. In that sense, HIV has been going on for 40 years.
It is always a good I idea to view any kind of graphic information display with some skepticism, even a slick one like this.
If I had to summarize this, I don’t believe it is a hoax. I believe it is a serious problem. But I believe in my heart there has to be a better way than chopping the tree down to save the tree from the fire.
But for some reason, we have divorced the cost of the disease itself from the cost of the cure.
We put a cost on everything. We do it every day, all of us. To prove it, you could say to someone “You love your 85 year old grandmother. Would you spend every cent you have in your retirement account, and your children’s future earnings, and their children’s earnings, and all of you to live in poverty for all your lives to save her?”
Of course, most people wouldn’t. But that appears to be where we are.
Great!! Puts things in perspective.
Thanks so much. Your post puts things in perspective.
Additionally, I am a bit of a data junkie, and love a good graphic display of data. This one below was one of my favorite ones, and is a bit horrific when you realize what it represents...Napoleon's army got pitchf***ed.
Yes, it does. It's humor. Read posts 5 and 11.
Criticizing people for using the term "Spanish Flu" is not virtuous.
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