If it's the flu, it's not treatable with antibiotics. Antivirals, general care, symptom relief, and vaccines are the best we've got. You've got to remember, to

If it's the flu, it's not treatable with antibiotics. Antivirals, general care, symptom relief, and vaccines are the best we've got. You've got to remember, too, that it wasn't an especially virulent strain of influenza alone that caused the deaths from 1917-1919. It spread quickly among the war-weary, crowded, exposure-riddled young men who lived with chickens and hogs at the battlefronts. It was common practice at the time to logistically set up small-pen animals close to the long, mostly stable fronts as a source of local food rather than shipping in so much preserved food. Those young men then travelled far and wide across the continent and even overseas as their service rotations came and especially when hostilities ceased. https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/ https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/ tells the story about as well and succinctly as any source. http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/body-and-mind/the-spanish-influenza-pandemic-and-its-relation-to-the-first-world-war/ http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/body-and-mind/the-spanish-... and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862337/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862337/ have lots of information. As is common, the war's conditions and aftereffects killed far more people than died in combat. It was a nasty flu, but humans helped it out about the best we could.