That 675,000 people died in the United States the 1918 influenza pandemic?
If, like me, you wondered how that compares to our current crisis, here are some numbers. The population of the U.S. in 1918 estimated at 103 million (population is a moving target. It is always an estimate. The number of dead represented .5 to .6 percent of the total population.
Yesterday the U.S. reached 500,000 deaths from Covid. The current population of the U.S. is just over 330 million. By my math we’ve seen the death of .1 to .2 percent of the population.
It is less than 1918, but is roughly the equivelent of losing the entire city of Atlanta, or Kansas City. And it is still growing. With luck, vaccines, improved medical practices, and care for one another throuogh masks and distancing we’ll end this a a lower loss of life, percentage wise, thatn 1918.
As luck would have it, my soon to be published The Price of Glory concerns itself with vaccination for an earlier scourge, small pox. I didn’t realize how timely it would be when I started writing about vaccine resistance, superstition, and fear.
LIkewise. In fact, when I started writing my soon-to-be new release, I planned a cholera epidemic. But I was in Regency England, 25 years before cholera arrived.
Epidemics, vaccination, people’s attitudes… It was all planned before the pandemic hit, though I was writing during 2020.
One thing to note is that the version of the 1918 flu only killed about a quarter of the total death toll. The version that returned the following winter accounted for the majority of the deaths.