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That’s one common hypothesis put forward, along with European, African and as I said Chinese origin. However, there have been recent developments since the publishing of “The Great Influenza” that have IMO lent a little more credence to it being from China, such as DNA analysis showing similarities to viruses still wandering around mostly in that part of the world.

The final truth of the matter is that nobody knows for certain where the bloody thing came from for certain and we will probably never know. There is, however, new evidence coming to light all the time - for example, research has uncovered that there *may* have been an earlier form of the virus afflicting British soldiers in England at least as early as 1917. https://www.statnews.com/2018/12/05/1918-spanish-flu-unraveling-mystery/

Here is research regarding the Chinese theory: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/

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A decade after the war, Kansas was identified as another possible breeding ground, due to reports of an influenza outbreak there that spread to a nearby Army camp in March 1918, killing 48 doughboys.

But in his study, Humphries reports that an outbreak of respiratory infections, which at the time were dubbed an endemic “winter sickness” by local health officials, were causing dozens of deaths a day in villages along China’s Great Wall. The illness spread 300 miles (500 kilometers) in six weeks’ time in late 1917.

At first thought to be pneumonic plague, the disease killed at a far lower rate than is typical for that disease.

Humphries discovered that a British legation official in China wrote that the disease was actually influenza, in a 1918 report. Humphries made the findings in searches of Canadian and British historical archives that contain the wartime records of the Chinese Labor Corps and the British legation in Beijing.

Sealed Railcars

At the time of the outbreak, British and French officials were forming the Chinese Labor Corps, which eventually shipped some 94,000 laborers from northern China to southern England and France during the war.

“The idea was to free up soldiers to head to the front at a time when they were desperate for manpower,” Humphries says.

Shipping the laborers around Africa was too time-consuming and tied up too much shipping, so British officials turned to shipping the laborers to Vancouver on the Canadian West Coast and sending them by train to Halifax on the East Coast, from which they could be sent to Europe.

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This predates the Kansas incident.