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A BBC documentary called "The Flu That Killed 50 Million" is informative. As of time 130 million were infected and 200 thousand dead, Sir Arthur Newsholme, seni
by gradschool 7y ago
A BBC documentary called "The Flu That Killed 50 Million" is
informative. As of time 130 million were infected and 200 thousand
dead, Sir Arthur Newsholme, senior medical officer at Whitehall, sent
a message to his European counterparts proposing a cease fire because
an existential threat to humanity transcends national rivalries. (Just
kidding!) He actually decided against even warning the public to take
any precautions because it would not be "expedient" for the munitions
factories to slow down. My takeaway is never to put it past those in
power to decimate of the population if it suits their ends.
- technotony 7y agoTo be fair, those in authority were doing a pretty good job decimating the male working age population before flu came along. They could probably model the daily death rate from flu in it's early days to be less than that on the Western front... especially if they weren't very good at modelling exponential growth.
- stevenwoo 7y agoThe SIR model for infectious disease growth was proposed in 1927, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infectious_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infe.... We got taught this in our undergrad calculus class and wrote programs to play with the different parameters - it's kind of eye opening if one has never thought too much about it - pretty much everyone gets infected within some constraints.
- cheshire137 7y agoThere's an episode of American Experience from PBS that's about the 1918 flu epidemic that's also good.
- bredren 7y agoHandy link to the 2018 50 million film: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0blmn5l https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0blmn5l Doesn't work for outside UK IPs. It is on TPB, though.