Spanish flu: What the World looked like after the pandemic of 1918

If you have not heard of the Spanish flu pandemic, the coronary crisis may have attracted your attention to the fact that this deadly virus spread worldwide at the beginning of the 20th century.

Often referred to as the “n of all pandemics”, it caused deaths of between 40 and 50 million within two years, between 1918 and 1920, according to the World Health Organisation and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Scientists and historians believe that one third of the world's population, then numbering some 1.8 billion people, was infected.

And the flu caused a total of more deaths than World War I itself, which ended at a time when the disease had begun to spread.

As the whole world reacts to the COVID-19 crisis, let us look closely at the last pandemic that buried the world in the country, and what did it look like when it finally ended?

In 1918 medicine and science were far more limited in the fight against disease than they do today.

Doctors knew that there were microorganisms behind the Spanish flu and that the disease could be transmitted from person to person, but they still thought it was caused by bacteria and not by viruses.

The treatment was also limited to the world's first antibiotic, for example, not discovered until 1928.

The first flu vaccine became available to the public in the 1940s. It is important to note that there was no health system for all people at that time. Even in affluent countries, the public sewer system was still a luxury.

“The Spanish Flew”.

To make things worse, the Spanish flu attacked in a way that was not previously seen in flu pandemics, such as the one in 1889-90, which killed more than a million people worldwide.

Most of the victims were between the ages of 20 and 40, and the men were disproportionally affected perhaps after the pandemic was thought to have started in crowded military camps in the Western Front and spread as troops returned home after World War I.

A 2020 study conducted by Harvard scholar Robert Barrot estimated that although about 0.5 percent of the then American population died from the Spanish flu (about 550,000 people), 5.2 percent of India's population was affected, or about 17 million deaths.

The consequences for the economy were great. Barrot and his team estimated that the pandemic led to an average drop of 6 percent of gross domestic product in all countries.

“World War I victims and Spanish flu led to a real economic disaster”, says writer Katarina Arnold, author of the book Pandemiic 1918.