Comparisons to 1918 Spanish Flu

[thrifty++]

The recent death of the 19 year old in Montreal had me thinking about cytokine storm and how that caused a lot of young people to be more affected by the Spanish Flu.

On looking into it, it does look as though there is some research to show cytokine storm does come into play for COVID. But it does not seem to have been affecting young people as much. One of the reasons that some people are not as worried about the pandemic is that it has been affecting older people mostly. However, I see that was also the case with the Spanish Flu. For the first wave. It was only killing and heavily affecting older people. But then the second wave was when it started to affect younger people. There were four waves with the Spanish Flu,

A scary thought is if we have a repeat of what happened with the Spanish Flu. Although, I do not understand why the Spanish Flu suddenly turned to younger people in the second wave when they recovered fairly easily in the first wave when it killed older people. Some sort of mututation perhaps. Whats to say it wont mutate again like that. Whats to say it wont. How is that predicted one way or the other. Im hoping we do not have a similar pattern to Spanish Flu.

[tonyedgecombe]

My understanding of the second wave of the Spanish flu was that it was a problem of our own making. Soldiers on the front who were mildly sick were kept in place but the most ill were sent back home. This allowed the more virulent versions of the virus to emerge in the second wave.

This isn't the case with Covid, serious cases are isolated until they recover or die so the same evolutionary pressures don't exist.

It 's interesting to compare numbers though, 50 million people dies from the Spanish flu, so far less than half that number have been infected with Covid.

[thrifty++]

@tonyedgcombe - interesting. Hopefully that makes it less likely we will get a more virulent strain. Re 50 million people, we are only at the beginning by comparison. More people have been killed by COVID than Spanish Flu comparing timelines. Spanish Flu started in March but the deadlier second wave started in October. There was also significant under-reporting at the time for political reasons. And I think it ss likely we are seeing that again with some countries.

[catpepper]

If measures are not kept in place then I think Covid19 could kill a lot more than the 1918 flu.

Population density is much higher in most cities than before. The world is much more connected, and more people are traveling from continents to continents today due to budget flights.

[tonyedgecombe]

There was a interesting piece of research out of China that showed population density doesn’t seem to impact the spread of the virus very much.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/sustainable ... ence-china