"I wonder about your statistics from 1918, just because the numbers don't add up. The flu in 1918 killed 5% of those who were infected, but you said it killed 5% of the entire population of the world, which would suggest that every single person in the world was infected."
You are right, I mispoke. I regurgitiated a figure I had misread. We had over 40,000,000 dead worldwide and about 600-700,000 in the USA in under a year. We lost about 1/6 as many in WWI
"I read that 40 million people died. Oddly though, in all my (I admit somewhat limited study) of world history, in all my (public school) learning, I never before HEARD of this horrible epidemic in 1918.
I would be tempted to ask how big a deal it could have been if it doesn't make the top 20 list of big events in the last hundred years. But I know that history is not an exact science."
Try this link for a good read on the subject:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/
1918 was the worst disaster in human history.
**1918 was the worst disaster in human history.**
Bull, it killed more persons but thats because the population is much greater.
Other than some isolated cases the death rates of the 1918 flu never came close to what Smallpox did to the native Americans or the Plague did to Europe in the middle ages.