Topic: History: Spanish flu, Over 50 million death. - page 2. (Read 333 times)

Before China and countries in Asia shut down their borders, the virus had already spread to many parts of the world, including America, Europe and Africa, imo why it took some countries quite a while to get their first case and subsequent cases was because they had insufficient testing facilities (Africa for example). It's not so easy to shut down your borders as a country, that is indirectly shutting down your economy, mind you that it took quite a while before countries had to succumb to closing their territories to outsiders, while returnees were quarantined, it was more or less the only option then.

All these makes it impossible to prevent a disease like Corona virus from spreading to many parts of the world. To mention a few; tourism and sports connects people to different parts of the world, for example when the virus hadn't become full blown, thousands of people still traveled to watch football matches (sports) in other countries, especially in England, Italy and Spain and months later they had a real issue on their hands. These and many more made the spread inevitable, and I don't think anyone is to blame for it.
Natural immunity.

I get your point but pandemic avoidance is tough when the world is so interconnected. You can mitigate diseases but to an extent, some diseases are going to run its course. COVID-19 being one of them.

The real concern is when you have a disease like Ebola, roughly a 50% mortality rate, that has airborne transmission like COVID-19. In 2014, Ebola was mostly isolated in countries in Africa, which doesn't have large outgoing international travel, and it was only spread through direct contact.

Wait until we see some sort of super bug that makes it way from animal to animal transmission to animal to human in densely populated areas with a high mortality rate, and then we're in trouble. You can try mitigation efforts but the hope is we have the technology to eliminate the virus or therapeutic agents to treat it. To your point, if we're trying to be prepared, making sure hospital capacity is high is probably the best way to minimize the casualties. I'm not sure what else you can do.

Back then they had never seen a virus, dead or alive. Their microscopes weren't good enough.

Even though they had the proper methodology for filtering a virus, seems that the viruses they filtered out didn't affect any of the people they purposely injected, to fulfill the protocols or the methodology.

In other words, whatever caused the pandemic back then is unknown and unproven.

Although, you are right. But the point is that Spanish flu killed people more than covid-19 and is still regarded as the deadiest pandemic disease as of today. Also, what I am just trying to drive out is for governments to stringently focus on how disease outbreak can be prevented before resulting into pandemic disease. It has happened in the past, it is happening now, and there are possibilities of disease pandemic period in the future. That, this should be a lesson towards pandemic disease avoidance.

The Spanish flu had an inflated death rate because there wasn't modern medicine. If COVID-19 didn't have mitigation efforts supported by modern technology and medicine, you can guarantee you'd see millions dead before herd immunity kicked in.

As I was reading the BBC news today, I read about 1918 spanish flu, this flu was deadlier than covid-19, this is the summary:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200302-coronavirus-what-can-we-learn-from-the-spanish-flu
One hundred years ago, a world recovering from a global war that had killed some 20 million people suddenly had to contend with something even more deadly: a flu outbreak.

The pandemic, which became known as Spanish flu, is thought to have begun in cramped and crowded army training camps on the Western Front. The unsanitary conditions – especially in the trenches along the French border – helped it incubate and then spread. The war ended in November 1918, but as the soldiers returned home, bringing the virus with them, an even greater loss of life was just around the corner; between 50 million and 100 million people are thought to have died.

The world has suffered many pandemics in the years since – at least three serious flu outbreaks among them – but no pandemic has been as deadly, nor as far-reaching.

Doctors have described the Spanish flu as the “greatest medical holocaust in history”. It was not just the fact it killed so many, it was that so many of its victims were young and healthy. Normally, a healthy immune system can deal reasonably well with flu, but this version struck so quickly that it overwhelmed the immune system, causing a massive over-reaction known as a cytokine storm, flooding the lungs with fluid which became the perfect reservoir for secondary infections. Older people, interestingly, were not as susceptible, perhaps because they had survived a very similar strain of flu which had started to spread through human populations in the 1830s.

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Corona virus has never been the first pandemic disease, and it has never been the deadliest, the deadliest was Spanish flu that claimed over 50 million lives when people traveling through the air has never been so common like these days, I am just wondering this should have been a lesson why the world should respond fast to any disease outbreak, closing border from citizens of such country that are spreading the disease and doing all possible best to help eliminate the disease.

So far there are pandemic diseases in the past, there could also be pandemic diseases later after covid-19, the goverments of each countries should not be lenient about any viral outbreak again, be it epidemic or pandemic, all measures should be in place in order to easily extinct the virus away from earth.

I believe covid-19 will later extinct too but this should be a lesson. Prevention is better than cure, and could save more peoples lives. There should be other professional and medical ways of preventing diseases to spread.