You said — Both the little girl and the doctor are believed to have been perfectly healthy before succumbing to swine flu
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That reminds me of the flu epidemic (of 1918) that my grandmother used to tell me about, all the time (when I was a kid). I remember the phrase that she used.... “They were dropping in the street like flies!”
I used to think, for many years, that she was just using colorful and exaggerated language to get the point across about how deadly it was. However, I found out, many years later (after looking into it), that some people would be fine in the morning, before going to work (i.e., showing or feeling no symptoms) and then by the end of the day and maybe by the time they got off work, they would literally “drop dead”... and I mean drop down dead while walking in the streets.
So, “dropping in the street like flies” was apparently true. I also read somewhere (when reading up on it in the past) that in some places (in the U.S.) there would be carts going around picking up dead bodies in the streets.
And so, yes, if these people in the 1918 flu epidemic could drop in the street like flies, feeling fine at the beginning of the day and being dead at the end of the day, this sort of thing you’re talking about could happen again.
Publisher's note:
"At the height of WWI, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. "It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.
"Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing danger of the avian flu, "The Great Influenza" is ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.
Annotation:
"Victims of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 suffered horrifying effects, including bleeding from the ears and nose, and they usually died.
"It killed more people in a year than the plagues of the Middle Ages did in a century. In the United States, where there weren't enough coffins to house the increasing numbers of bodies, nearly seven times as many people died of influenza than were killed in the First World War.
"Award-winning historian John M. Barry tells the story of the worst flu epidemic in world history, including background on microbiology, immunology, and epidemiology."
NO cheers, unfortunately.