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Well maybe you didn’t study have to study history at school. But I did and we learnt that the 1918 flu killed more people than WW1.
by willyt 6y ago
Well maybe you didn’t study have to study history at school. But I did and we learnt that the 1918 flu killed more people than WW1.
- mplanchard 6y agoSame! And on top of this, 500k is more Americans than died in WWII. It’s true the proportions are a bit different due to population growth, but we can’t pretend like it’s anything but a staggering number of people
- umvi 6y ago> But I did and we learnt that the 1918 flu killed more people than WW1. Hmm, but I would argue there's a difference between young healthy people dying en masse (war) and mainly the sickly and elderly dying (pandemic). It feels awfully utilitarian to distill it down to this, but I'm sorry, a healthy 18 year old dying from a bullet is way worse than a 70 year old dying of a disease, especially from a "years of life lost" perspective. In my view, with covid, it's mostly the elderly that got a few years cut short, but most of them would have died within the next decade anyway of something else (including "age") and I predict we will see "negative excess deaths" in the coming years for that very reason.