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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

Many orders of magnitude fewer deaths, for one?

Orders fewer? Lets look at the Spanish flu in US - the US wasn't ravaged by WWI/revolutions/rebelions, didn't have systemic hunger, etc. and had time to and implemented some of those measures like quarantines/lockdowns/masks, so very reasonable to compare to today. Spanish flu killed 700K in US . Covid already 250K in US - even if we imagine that we're at the peak today, it still means end number like 500K.

I would only like to add that the US population was only around 100m around 1920, and travel would have been much more limited. But overall I agree that the worldwide handling in 2020 has been sobering.

One interesting thing to consider is that the US isn’t actually the center of the world, so generalizing it’s reaction to the rest of the world makes no sense.

Looking at the world instead, COVID has killed just over a million people so far, and Spanish Flu is esimated to have killed anywhere between 17 and 100 million people, at a time when the world population was much less and travel was much harder. So yes, orders of magnitude.

Food for thought:

- The average age of death during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was 28 [1].

- 70% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths are age 70 and above [2].

These are very different pandemics, and it's not clear what comparisons between the two actually tell us.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoratio...

[2]: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/22035

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