A short history of the 1918 pandemic by Ohio State University professor Ed Harris.

"November 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the deadliest month of the greatest pandemic in recorded history: the “Spanish Flu.”

Recent estimates suggest that this flu [2]claimed as many as 50 million lives around the world between 1918 and 1919, killing more people in a single year than the entire “Black Death” of the 14th century."

http://origins.osu.edu/print/5812

I didn't know it was that bad. I used to be surprised I didn't know any relatives with stories about it. On the other hand, I only knew two or three who might have remembered it.

It's very, very hard to think we might be in a similar situation.

That is a good summary of what occurred.

Many years ago, I read John Barry's book The Great Influenza. Scared the hell out of me.

Yes, it is very hard to imagine.

I really don't like facile comparisons with the middle ages. If the 1918 influenza killed the same percentage of the population as the Black Death, 60 million Americans would have died of the flu. The Black Death fundamentally and permanently altered European history in so many ways. It destroyed feudalism as a successful social system.