INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE SPANISH FLU PANDEMIC

1. It was named the Spanish Flu because Spain was neutral in WWI and thus did not have press censorship. Their newspapers reported freely on it, especially after King Alfonso XIII got ill.
2. We still don’t know where it originated. Possibilities are Kansas, the Western Front, or China.  China seems most likely and the fact that 96,000 Chinese laborers were used by the Allies would explain its initial spread.  From then, it was spread mostly by soldiers.
3. Symptoms included severe fatigue, fever, headaches, and rib-wracking coughing. Victims might bleed from the mouth, nose, and ears.  You knew you were terminal when your extremities took on a blueish/purple tinge due to the lack of oxygen resulting from fluid in the lungs.
4. 1/3 of the world’s population was infected. 50-100 million died which made the mortality rate of the infected was as high as 20% in some countries.  The number of dead was somewhere 2-5% of the total world population.  The death total not only eclipsed that of the war, but all 20^th Century wars combined.
5. The highest death rate was young adults ages 20-40.
6. The second wave of the disease was the worst, with the third (and last) being also worse than the first. 70% of the deaths came in a ten-week period in the fall of 1918.   It is assumed the pandemic ended because the virus mutated into a weaker strain.
7. 675,000 Americans died. Several things contributed to this.  Many nurses were away in France.  Soldiers and sailors returned with the disease and were not quarantined because the government did not want to reduce morale.  For example, Philadelphia was hard hit when a troop ship with infected sailors returned.  Although medical experts urged a quarantine, the city fathers insisted on holding a scheduled military parade attended by 200,000.  In the end, almost 13,000 Philadelphians died.
8. Pres. Wilson caught it during the Versailles peace conference. His Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt returned from a trip to the trenches gravely ill.  Too ill to hide his love letters from his mistress.  Eleanor almost divorced him over this.
9. The most famous death was Rose Cleveland, Grover’s First Lady.
10. Native Americans were the hardest hit group in America, probably due to weak immune systems.

https://www.shobanajeyasingh.co.uk/explore/10-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-1918-19-spanish-flu/

https://www.healthline.com/health/1918-flu-pandemic-facts#8

https://learnodo-newtonic.com/spanish-flu-facts

https://www.buzzfeed.com/mikespohr/15-astonishing-facts-about-the-1918-flu-pandemic-which