From the article
**One thing is clear, however: In its present form, H5N1 has killed over half of the people it's infected. The great flu pandemic of 1918-19, by contrast, killed about 5 percent of its victims.**
According to the link below the death rate was 2.5%
http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/
Doubling the death rate from the 1918 Flu makes me question his other data. He's hyping.
"Doubling the death rate from the 1918 Flu makes me question his other data. He's hyping. According to the link below the death rate was 2.5%"
The case mortality rate varied widely. An overall figure is impossible to obtain, or even estimate reliably, because no solid information about total cases exists. In U.S. Army camps where reasonably reliable statistics were kept, case mortality often exceeded 5 percent, and in some circumstances exceeded 10 percent. In the British Army in India, case mortality for white troops was 9.6 percent, for Indian troops 21.9 percent.
In isolated human populations, the virus killed at even higher rates. In the Fiji islands, it killed 14 percent of the entire population in 16 days. In Labrador and Alaska, it killed at least one-third of the entire native population (Jordan, 1927; Rice, 1988).
From your own cite:http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/
"The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster."
Clearly, if it is not known how many people died it cannot be precisely determined exactly what the mortality rate was. Dr. Osterholm did not claim to have an exact figure and niether did the article you cite. You need more than this to (honestly) attack the credibility of one of the foremost researchers in the field.