History Says 1918 Flu Killed the Young and Healthy. These Bones Say Otherwise | Hacker News Reader

History Says 1918 Flu Killed the Young and Healthy. These Bones Say Otherwise

wired.com

34 pointsdigital5517 comments

> “At the time of a pandemic, there is always an assertion that it’s a great equalizer, that the wealthy will be dropping to the same degree as the poor. And in retrospect, that is never true,” says Rachel Mason Dentinger, a historian of biology and medicine and an assistant professor at the University of Utah. “What emerges every time is that social determinants of health play a huge role in how diseases affect people disproportionately.”

Didn't even take retrospect to see it with covid from the very beginning. White collar workers did their jobs from home and had groceries and meals delivered. More precarious service workers cooked their meals and delivered their groceries, and died of covid in much higher numbers because of it.

you know what _was_ disproportionately killing young and healthy? the war!

And the second order effects of surviving the war also took a toll for the young.

The tldr here is that they looked for people in the sample who's bones had evidence of wear that would normally be fixed in "healthy" people. They found some, a bit more than expected for the sample size. What it does not say is anything about age or anything about healthy people not also dying. What this paper suggests is that the 1918 influenza a H1N1 killed a lot of people who were unhealthy too.

And the idea that Cleveland only had one 7 month long wave of 1918 H1N1 is also ... a big leap not really supported.

It's too bad the actual paper is behind a paywall. You can never tell what is a wired journalist misunderstanding and what's actually in the paper.

The Wired writeup is one of the more misleading ones. You're right: what the paper finds is that Spanish Flu disproportionately killed the young cohorts... it just may have been within young cohorts disproportionately killing young people with subtle hidden frailties.

The real importance of this work is that it supports the interpretation that Spanish Flu was so deadly because young people missed a cycle of flu which would have immunized them to it as effectively as it had immunized (the surviving) elderly people, as opposed to some sort of intrinsic-youth-targeting factor unique to Spanish Flu.

> disproportionately killing young people with subtle hidden frailties.

I'm really curious how many of the surviving elderly lacked those hidden frailties. That is, all else held equal, how many of the youth killed by the Spanish Flu would have died of other causes prior to becoming elderly?

https://archive.ph/wDUF8

Evaluating the truthiness of journalism today forces me to distrust history as a whole.

Whatever the history books say happened is what didn't happen.

There is a saying with economists/financial forecasters: no model is correct, but some are useful. It's not a problem driven by journalism. There is very little (interesting or useful) fact in history, it is mostly opinion. Journalists/historians/politicians contribute to that.

Well, no history book is 100% accurate.

But, I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bath water here. It's important to use critical reading skills, seek out multiple sources, and understand the context of the writer and target audience.

I totally agree and I too did this a long time, but no, the last ~5 years following this advice can only result in throwing them all out. There is no baby in the bath water.

There are people who make their livelihood evaluating journalistic sources. I'd personally suggest seeking out factual news sources over editorialized news and straight opinion articles masquerading as news. Even those will have their biases on what to publish, but those biases will often be far more evident (if not overtly spelled out).

Ad Fontes' Media Bias Chart is a decent starting point. Various statistics gathering websites are other decent sources.

>There are people who make their livelihood evaluating journalistic sources. I'd personally suggest seeking out factual news sources over editorialized news and straight opinion articles masquerading as news. Even those will have their biases on what to publish, but those biases will often be far more evident (if not overtly spelled out).

Bias isn't exactly truthiness. You can be fantasticly unbiased and still be wrong.

I have done what you recommend as well, quite useful for the last half decade.

Everyone can be wrong. This should be a default assumption for any information from any source. Even automated systems can have faults or systemic errors.

History is written by the winners.

Except with the Goths. They did some winning, but it seems like they didn't do much writing.

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