It sounds quite good that way round - in lucky places only 2% died of the 30% who caught it. That's a chance of dying of 1 in 150.
Overall the situation was at best this:
World population in 1918 - about 1.6 billion.
Deaths from the Spanish Flu - at least 20 million
So chances of dying from the flu was: 1 in 80. And that's a minimum
I think that a disease that suddenly appears and kills 1 in 80 people is something to watch for, and to work to prevent or ameliorate.
Seasonal Flu does kill people each year. The numbers currently run at less than half a million a year, or 1 in 12,000. Mostly among the unwell elderly and the very young. The Spanish flu mostly killed people between ages 20 and 40.
The attention paid to new strains of flu is a sensible response to a real threat.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
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
|