fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
So far, just one death in the United States. Regular flu kills more. Sheesh.
Not quite. It was the "worst pandemic of the modern era," and a lot of people died in the Spanish Flu pandemic, but it didn't decimate anything. As Cory Doctorow notes in his article ( http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/29/spanish-flu-of-1918.html ), 72% of Americans didn't contract the Spanish Flu, and the global survival rate was over 97%. It killed a lot of people in absolute numbers, but that's what happens when you take even very small percentages of very large numbers.It's a mutation/sub-type of the Spanish Flu, which decimated(and then some) back in the day.