Can we knock comparisons to the 1918 Spanish flu on the head please?

LiquidZeb

There's a recurring trend on the threads to compare the current pandemic to the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak that left 50 million people dead, many young people who died of cytokine storm brought on by the virus.

As tempting as it is to compare the last major global pandemic to the current one it doesn't compute with me for several reasons.

The world has changed dramatically in several ways. The main one is major advances in quality of life.

Back in the early 20th century across Europe and America, millions of people lived in cramped tenements where several families shared the one house, in extreme circumstances the one room.

These people lived in cities where industrial chimneys of the factories they worked in belched smoke and fumes that left layers of permanent smog floating around. The working conditions were backbreaking and workers often we're crippled for life in industrial actions. It's easy to see from this lifestyle how Marxist groups picked up so much momentum post war and Russian revolution.

Places like Birmingham, the Ruhr and Philadelphia employed millions of migrant workers from the countryside in the war effort, squeezing more people into already cramped cities. This was a prime setup for the flu to spread.

People lived without running water and electricity, non-existent sanitation and most hospitals were charities with little state input.

Not to mention the greatest the spirit of international cooperation spread to was helping one lot of countries blow the **** out of the other. There would be no medical research taking place between Nations in this post war era.

The very fact we live in an era where there are dozens of vaccines and cures in development is a miracle.

I know this post rambled and went off topic, but I hope I made a few people realize that by bringing back the spirit of 1918, we do a disservice to both those who lost their lives and to ourselves by disregarding how far we've come.

Beasty

Why start a thread on it then?