Quote:
Originally Posted by krisk
when the Avian Flu looked like a real threat I did a LOT of reading about the 1917 flu pandemic and it is some scary sh*t maynard!
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Indeed.
There was a 66% chance that you wouldn't catch the flu to begin with, and if you did, there was an 80% - 90%
or higher chance that you would recover to full health and experience no lasting health impact.
In fact, the wikipedia article suggests that there were places where the mortality rate was as small as 2%. If you were living in those areas, your chances of survival--even if you fell into the unlucky 33% that caught the flu--was 98%.
There are lottery games with better odds that smart people still refuse to play.
The above, of course, doesn't change the reality of the 1918 flu outbreak... but it might help give some people a slightly saner perspective than is normally touted.
- Ahi