When you look at statistics of deaths from infectious diseases for say 1880 till 2020 the number of deaths till 1900 is (far) above the number of even the 1918/19 Spanish Flu...(Dr.J.C. had a nice chart...I googled for some statistics could not find one..) Putting a 2021 story in a story of a 1919 healthcrisis can get misleading. It is correct to claim international air travel was not stopped in 1919...the air travel that was there was limited-often military. From the UK to France-not (yet) long distance. (It is also correct to claim nobody took vaccines against the flu...But there were some vaccines in an early stage-maybe even making things worse..) World War 1 ended november 1918-some even link it to the pandemic. Transport of millions of soldiers on packed trains and ships to barracks that were overcrowded-first to the front lines then back to the UK, US, etc. I think was one "motor" of the Spanish Flu. Maybe you can even link the three waves with mass transports... Another factor was a lack of knowledge on how infectious diseases worked. Virusses were as good as unknown in that time-the "theory that would lead to the discovery of virusses" was been used in vaccines...but bio-science was very limited. Last year there was some discussion on the 1890 Russian Flu...could it have been a corona virus ? Given the symptoms were more similar with wath we did see in 2020 SARS-2. But in 1890 variants did not show up making a corona virus pandemic that different from a flu pandemic. It can be both number of infections and transport were limited enough-and we were lucky-maybe timing also a factor-that if the 1890 pandemic was a corona virus we did not see (much) variants (of risk) back then...The 1890 Russian Flu was linked to Russian railways as a transport route... To have a pandemic you need an infectious disease, enough hosts and transport to get the disease into the hosts... When I was looking for historic statistics I found this [url]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2004361[/url] or https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2004361 - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2004361 internet is a never ending source of information...
------------- We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. ~Albert Einstein
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