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More than 50 million people, an almost unimaginable figure, are estimated to have lost their lives worldwide in the 1918-1919 pandemic, otherwise known as the “Spanish flu”.
It was seen as the deadliest disease globally since the plague, or Black Death.
It was something rare among the not-so-dangerous flu viruses that hit young healthy people hardest, often dying out within just a few days of the onset of the first symptoms.
In the United States, the Spanish flu has an average life expectancy of 12 years. Authorities declared the pandemic closed two years later.
“The best health report for the city in 53 years,” wrote the New York Times on January 4, 1920. Enthusiasm, however, began to wane after a few weeks, and the numbers rose again.
Residents were assured that the virus responsible for the new wave would be milder, and people who got sick a year ago, already, would have been immunized.
But did the most horrible flu in history really disappear?
After infecting some 500 million people worldwide in 1918 and 1919, then estimated at nearly a third of the global population, the H1N1 strain that caused the Spanish flu came into the background and was described as the common seasonal flu.
Occasionally, however, his direct descendants combined with bird or swine flu to create powerful pandemic strains, such as that of 1957, that of 1968 which coincided with the terrible Hong Kong flu from which in a year 1 to 4 million people died across the globe, as well as that of 2009.
These outbreaks are thought to have been caused in part by the virus of 1918, which gave the Spanish flu the hated title “mother of all pandemics.”
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