(During World War II, life expectancy did briefly decline, but with nowhere near the severity of the collapse during the Great Influenza.) The descendants of English and Welsh babies born in 1918, who on average lived just 41 years, today enjoy life expectancies in the 80s. The period from 1916 to 1920 marked the last point in which a major reversal in global life expectancy would be recorded. Instead, what followed was a century of unexpected life. And yet, amazingly, neither came to pass. To put that in comparison, roughly three million people have died from Covid-19 over the past year, on a planet with four times as many people.īoth grim scenarios seemed within the bounds of possibility. The best estimates suggest that as many as 100 million people died from the Great Influenza outbreak that eventually circled the globe. ![]() ![]() In what was already a time of murderous war, the disease killed millions more on the front lines and in military hospitals in Europe in some populations in India, the mortality rate for those infected approached 20 percent. In the United States, it would cause nearly half of all deaths over the next year. The devastation at Camp Devens would soon be followed by even more catastrophic outbreaks, as the so-called Spanish flu - a strain of influenza virus that science now identifies as H1N1 - spread around the world. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day.” One can stand it to see one, two or 20 men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves. “It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes,” a camp physician wrote. But the speed with which it spread through the camp was not nearly as shocking as the lethality. By the end of the second week of the outbreak, one in five soldiers at the base had come down with the illness. In September 1918, a flu virus began spreading through Camp Devens, an overcrowded military base just outside Boston.
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