Comment by kwaldman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kwaldman | Hacker News Reader

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According to "The Great Influenza" by John Barry young people died due to cytokine storms. Essentially young people have a vigorous immune system that gave an aggressive attack. 1918 flu was unique in that the deaths was not just the very young and the very old (a U shaped distribution) but rather a W shaped distribution with the middle point being 20-40 age group

Also in the book - the "spanish" flu was called that since Spain was the only place with a free press at the time (e.g., US press was not free at the time) + massing of young men in US in camps - like Ft Devens. Flu traveled from overcrowded camp to camp and then jumped to local populations along rail lines (and then overseas as troops were shipped out) He describes it well, though would make a great visual as it moves from Boston to Chicago to NYC back into Providence/Brockton (which are just south of Boston). Transmission along rail (and shipping) lines.

Curious about the free press part. Are you saying that the US press was not allowed to report on the flu while in Spain they did?

I don't have a ready source, but the press in the US would usually comply with a request to censor news that some in government worried would lead to panic, blame, or accountability. Continued well into the 60's and 70's, and still present today.

The latest edition of Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill podcast describes how NBC agreed to censor his story on Harvey Weinstein. [https://podtail.com/podcast/the-catch-and-kill-podcast/episo...]

But IIRC there were dramatically more strict restrictions during WWI. Certainly in all the european countries busy fighting. (Famously, Bertrand Russell got himself locked up for six months for giving a lecture about whether the US should enter the war.)

Yes, this was a big reason why it was initially named the Spanish Flu. At the time that it began (with the war still on) Spain was one of the few countries that did not have very stringent press censorship in place.

This is discussed in several sources, but this is the one I had most readily available:

"In a month or two everyone outside of Spain was calling it "Spanish influenza," not because it originated there, but probably because Spain, still a nonbelligerent, had no wartime censorship to keep its health problems secret from the world. An estimated eight million Spaniards caught flu in May and June. The Spanish claimed that it had come from the battlefields of France, blown over by the strong winter winds, and that it would have been even worse but for the snowy Pyrenees."

America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby

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