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The 1918 Influenza Pandemic was the deadliest in human history. But the virus was a part of the historical events of the time. The History Guy recalls the forgotten history of how the events of 1918 shaped, and were shaped by, the pandemic. It is history that deserves to be remembered.

I explore the effect of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and how the methods employed at the time have made a recurrence in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

A 101-year-old Italian man born during the Spanish flu pandemic has reportedly survived a coronavirus infection as the outbreak continues to ravage his country and spread globally. Gloria Lisi, the vice mayor of Rimini, a city on the coast of the Adriatic Sea in the Italian north, said the man had been released from a hospital earlier this week and returned to his family. She identified him only as Mr. P. "He made it. Mr. P. made it," said Lisi, according to the ANSA news agency. Lisi said the man was admitted to a hospital in Rimini last week and...

Something new and timely from three economists who work for the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and MIT, respectively.It’s possible that 1918 and 2020 are too apples-and-oranges for a study of the former to usefully guide the reality of the latter. 1918 was a wartime economy. Certain regional economic effects may have overlapped with the flu pandemic to create an illusion of causation when there was merely correlation. And if the Oxford model’s theory of coronavirus is correct, this bug is waaaaaaaaay less deadly than the Spanish flu was, which will heavily...

Washington University researchers will soon begin testing a century-old technique that could help combat COVID-19. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved the university’s application to test plasma transfusion: isolating and transfusing antibodies from the blood of patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to those who are at high risk or are already ill from the virus. Researchers first need to collect blood from recovered patients, which could take some time, said Dr. Jeffrey Henderson, a professor at the Washington University School of Medicine. “This can be used on a case-by-case basis if the treating physician feels that...

I explore the historical parallels between the government's response prior to and during the Spanish flu of 1918 and the drive to quarantine during the COVID19 outbreak.

... Our nation has been through this before. In 1918, Americans fought a similar battle against the Spanish flu epidemic, which claimed 675,000 Americans and between 50 and 100 million lives around the world. ... Spanish flu, like coronavirus, wasn’t really a single national crisis. It was a set of hundreds of crises that played out differently in major cities, towns, states and Army and Navy World War I training camps. ... Worst off was Pittsburgh, where wartime steel and munitions production made officials reluctant to shut down and isolate. Pittsburgh didn’t confront the epidemic in time, found Brian O’Neill...

SARS, the 1918 flu pandemic, and Ebola have all helped public health officials prepare for major outbreaks. Each major outbreak is different though, and experts have a hard time predicting how they will end. The fallout of each disease largely depends on other circumstances — when we catch it, how contagious and fatal it is, how hygienic people are, and how quickly a vaccine or cure becomes available. With new cases of the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19, growing day by day, it’s natural to compare the new disease to other outbreaks in recent history. There was the 1918 influenza,...

The current discussion of whether it’s appropriate to associate a virus with its place of origin has prompted Wikipedia to reconsider how it refers to the Spanish flu. The story: Wikipedia editors are mulling over whether to rename the site’s Spanish flu article the “1918 influenza pandemic.” Most of them are opposed to the proposed change, saying the pandemic is most commonly known as the Spanish flu and changing the title of the article might lead to more confusion. Some even said that the move amounts to re-writing history.

Covid-19 cases as of 3-16-20 compared with 2018 death rates for the Flu. While Covid-19 has hardly competed its run, nor has the flu, yet for comparison with the flu we have the morality rate for the flu per state in 2017-2018 and total deaths, which I have provided along side the latest Covid counts (3-16-20 ) to the table below. Additional stats on the 2019-2020 Flu season are provided below the the table. During the 2017-2018 season, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza (P&I) was at or above the epidemic threshold for 16 consecutive weeks. Nationally,...

As August 1918 wound to a close in Boston and summer’s dog days gave way to fall, the city was awash in optimism...So when, in late August, a handful of sailors stationed at Commonwealth Pier in what is now the South Boston Seaport fell terribly ill, no one in the city paid much mind..The new flu arrived quickly at Camp Devens in Ayer...a bustling barracks of some 45,000 soldiers...with as many as 1,543 soldiers reporting ill with influenza in a single day... It wasn’t until Sept. 15, roughly three weeks after the first soldiers reported ill, that the influenza epidemic...

Chinese officials have confirmed 440 cases of the new coronavirus strain - 2019-nCoV - so far, with 17 deaths. Based on existing data, it is said to have a 2% death rate. This means that for every 50 people who catch the infection, one will statistically die. To put this into context, around one in every 1,000 who develop flu die, giving it a death rate of 0.1%. “This [2019-nCoV’s death rate] could be 2%, similar to Spanish flu,” Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, said. Professor Peter Horby, from the University of Oxford, pointed out fatality estimations are...

Blue lips. Blackened skin. Blood leaking from noses and mouths. Coughing fits so intense they ripped muscles. Crippling headaches and body pains that felt like torture. These were the symptoms of a disease that was first recorded in Haskell County, Kansas, one hundred years ago this week, in January 1918. From Kansas the illness spread quickly: not only throughout the U.S. but across the world. Eventually (if misleadingly) it became known as Spanish flu. And while its effects on the body were awful, the mortality rate was truly terrifying. During a pandemic that lasted two years from its outbreak in...

An investigation into the cause of their deaths is ongoing, but a recent World Health Organization alert warns of a deadly influenza strain, including in Fiji where it is “particularly affecting young adults.”

A Coast Guard lieutenant assigned to the service's headquarters in Washington, D.C., has been arrested on drug and gun possession charges, and is accused of plans to "murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country," according to documents filed in Maryland District Court. Lt. Christopher Paul Hasson, an acquisitions officer for the National Security Cutter Acquisition Program, was arrested Feb. 15 and charged with possession of a firearm and ammunition by an unlawful user or addict of controlled substances, and possession of Tramadol, a Schedule IV pain medication. A motion for detention pending trial, filed by U.S....

One hundred years ago this month, just as the first world war was drawing to a fitful close, an influenza virus unlike any before or since swept across the British Isles, felling soldiers and civilians alike... ...On 11 September 1918, Lloyd George, riding high on news of recent Allied successes, arrived in Manchester to be presented with the keys to the city. Female munitions workers and soldiers home on furlough cheered his passage from Piccadilly train station to Albert Square. But later that evening, he developed a sore throat and fever and collapsed. He spent the next 10 days confined...

A deadly illness took hold as WW1 ended and killed an estimated 50 million people globally. But the horror made the world aware of the need for collective action against infectious diseases, says Christian Tams, professor of International Law at the University of Glasgow. On Armistice Day, 1918, the world was already fighting another battle. It was in the grip of Spanish Influenza, which went on to kill almost three times more people than the 17 million soldiers and civilians killed during WW1. Dangerous diseases only reach the headlines if there is a risk of a pandemic, like the current...

The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents...

Scientists have created a life-threatening virus that closely resembles the 1918 Spanish flu strain that killed an estimated 50m people in an experiment labelled as "crazy" by opponents. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used a technique called reverse genetics to build the virus from fragments of wild bird flu strains. They then mutated the virus to make it airborne to spread more easily from one animal to another. "The work they are doing is absolutely crazy. The whole thing is exceedingly dangerous," said Lord May, the former President of the Royal Society and one time chief science adviser to...