If you must erroneously compare C19 to the Spanish flu, to begin with, do as I am and search out the number of people who died from Spanish flu in the first five months and compare this to the number of people who died from C19 in the first five months.

For a tally of the first five months, I haven’t located a reliable Spanish flu metric yet and I’m willing to wager it’s significantly more than the 250,000 we have to date for C19. Here’s why.

These are published (refereed by respected medical journals) global Spanish flu death estimates in the proposed four waves from spring 1918 to mid 1920.

Patterson and Pyle (1991)
24.7 to 39.3 million.

Johnson and Mueller (2002)
50 million, and when factoring in the incomplete widespread medical documentation of 1918-20 the estimate increases to 100 million.

Spreeuwenberg et al. (2018)
17.4 million.

And for consideration, these factors existed in the 1918 pandemic:

– The world population was 1.8 billion

– The state of medical science was far less sophisticated.

– The degree of global information exchange and the lack of a world health agency most probably means documented deaths are under reported.

– The most at risk age demographic was young, healthy people in 1918 thtough 1920.

Morens et al (2008) posit most deaths from the Spanish flu were from secondary bacterial pneumonia of common upper respiratory bacteria. Modern medical efficacy greatly lowers this cause of death.

Focusing on the United States, medical 1918 Spanish flu death documentation was much better than elsewhere in the world. The population of the United States in 1920 was 108.2 million people. A widely accepted death total from Spanish flu is 675,000. This is a death rate of 0.62%.

As of May 6, 2020, the CDC reports the number of US deaths from C19 is 74,665.

The first documented C19 deaths
in the United States are from the end of January, 2020. This is a little over three months to arrive at 74,665.

With the Spanish flu, it took approximately 50 months to reach herd immunity in the United States.

All pandemic time span factors exact and constant, we can expect 1,250,000 deaths in the United States in 50 months.

However…

The current population of the United States is 331 million people.

Applying the 0.62% Spanish flu death rate to the 2020 population, we can expect 2,064,000 deaths in the United States.

That’s a difference of 814,000 deaths. That’s 40%. Thus, by this numeric comparison, the Spanish flu is exceptionally more lethal than C19.

And, applying the 0.62% US death rate to the 2020 global population of 7.8 billion people, that is 4.83 million extrapolated deaths from C19. This is well below the Spreeuwenberg et al conservative Spanish flu estimate of 17.4 million and immensely lower than the upper end 100 million estimate from Johnson and Mueller.

There are over four times as many people on this planet today than 100 years ago. The reasonable expectatation is the direct death summation is skewed to 2020 instead of 1920. And it’s not. Not even close.

By any measure, the Spanish flu is by far more lethal than C19.

I’ve got a few comments to share.

– Comparing Spanish flu to C19 is comparing an influenza virus to a coronavirus. Forget apples and oranges. It’s comparing apples to cowbells. (I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell). You might as well compare the C19 virus to HIV or ebola.

– Why compare the C19 pandemic to only the Spanish flu pandemic? In recent history – the Spanish flu was 100 years ago – there was the Russian flu pandemic of 1889-1894, the Asian flu pandemic of 1957-1958, the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968-1969, and the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009-2010. Compare these pandemics to C19. I’m going to.

– But, again, this is comparing influenza virus to coronavirus. Comparing the C19 pandemic to SARS and MERS is an honest comparison of coronavirus to coronavirus. I will also be making this comparison.

I’ve done my homework. How about you?

So, how’s that comparison coming?