do healthy people really die of flu

I got this from researching the Spanish Flu in 1918 Wikipedia because of several distant relatives who died from it. Between 40 to 50 million died maybe more. Not all of them were sick.

Spanish flu (1918–1920)[edit]
Main article: Spanish flu
The 1918 flu pandemic, commonly referred to as the Spanish flu, was a category 5 influenza pandemic caused by an unusually severe and deadly Influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1.

The difference between the influenza mortality age-distributions of the 1918 epidemic and normal epidemics. Deaths per 100,000 persons in each age group, United States, for the interpandemic years 1911–1917 (dashed line) and the pandemic year 1918 (solid line).[37]

The Spanish flu pandemic lasted from 1918 to 1920.[38] Older estimates say it killed 40–50 million people[39] while current estimates say 50 million to 100 million people worldwide were killed.[26] This pandemic has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history" and may have killed as many people as the Black Death,[30] although the Black Death is estimated to have killed over a fifth of the world's population at the time,[40] a significantly higher proportion.

This huge death toll was caused by an extremely high infection rate of up to 50% and the extreme severity of the symptoms, suspected to be caused by cytokine storms.[39] Indeed, symptoms in 1918 were so unusual that initially influenza was misdiagnosed as dengue, cholera, or typhoid. One observer wrote, "One of the most striking of the complications was hemorrhage from mucous membranes, especially from the nose, stomach, and intestine. Bleeding from the ears and petechial hemorrhages in the skin also occurred."[26] The majority of deaths were from bacterial pneumonia, a secondary infection caused by influenza, but the virus also killed people directly, causing massive hemorrhages and edema in the lung.[41]

The Spanish flu pandemic was truly global, spreading even to the Arctic and remote Pacific islands. The unusually severe disease killed between 2 and 20% of those infected, as opposed to the more usual flu epidemic mortality rate of 0.1%.[26][37]

Another unusual feature of this pandemic was that it mostly killed young adults, with 99% of pandemic influenza deaths occurring in people under 65, and more than half in young adults 20 to 40 years old.[42] This is unusual since influenza is normally most deadly to the very young (under age 2) and the very old (over age 70). The total mortality of the 1918–1919 pandemic is not known, but it is estimated that up to 1% of the world's population was killed. As many as 25 million may have been killed in the first 25 weeks; in contrast, HIV/AIDS has killed 25 million in its first 25 years.[26]

__________________
Disabled Preppers Group
For those of us who are disabled, whether it be SSDI, SSI, Military, family members who are disabled and would like to discuss with others on how we might be able to get through today's times, SHTF or joining a MAG and what challenges may be faced with that.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

do healthy people really die of flu