The 1918 influenza pandemic is the deadliest in modern history, claiming an estimated 50 million lives worldwide, including 675,000 in the United States. By some measures, the toll of the Covid-19 surge in New York City this spring resembled that of the 1918 flu pandemic. In March and April, the overall death rate was just 30 percent lower than during the height of the pandemic in the city, despite modern medical advances, according to an analysis published on Thursday in JAMA Network Open. Many people liken Covid-19 to seasonal influenza while regarding the 1918 flu pandemic as a time of incomparable devastation, said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and lead author of the analysis. “But in reality, what 1918 looked like is basically this,” he said, except with dead bodies in refrigerated trucks rather than piled in the streets.

Source: New York Times August 13, 2020 15:03 UTC