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Originally Posted by nomadking
4) If herd immunity wasn't a fact, then people would've still been dying from Spanish Flu for the past 100 years.
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My reading of it is that it was the associated health complications and recent world events which contributed to the high mortality rate. The Swine Flu outbreak in 2009 is the same strain as the Spanish Flu but I think the outcome was different because of its management.
How much 'herd immunity' factors into that I think it still up for review.
However although we are better at treating effects, the argument is still that we should try and stop it pandemics happening - not aim for 'herd immunity':
https://www.clinicalcorrelations.org...es-a-weakness/
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Still, most of the deaths from the influenza of 1918 were due to bacterial pneumonia, for which we now have antibiotics. Currently, it is resistance that is the dilemma. In some parts of the United States, 35% or more of pneumococcal infections are resistant to the antibiotic of choice.[1] ARDS has a poor prognosis: despite advances in understanding its physiopathology, mortality rates remain as high as 40-46%.4 Though it is difficult to imagine a disaster on the scale of the 1918 infuenza almost a century later, a pandemic is not improbable. Now, in the face of a possible threat, efforts should be directed at prevention, which may be our best tool.
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https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/195/7/1018/800918
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The weight of evidence, supported by mathematical modeling data [98], suggests that if a novel virus as pathogenic as that of 1918 were to reappear today, a substantial proportion of a potential 1.9 million fatalities (assuming 1918 attack and case-fatality rates in the current US population) could be prevented with aggressive public-health and medical interventions. In an age of frequent air travel, we might expect global spread to proceed rapidly and to be difficult to control, but hardly much more so than the 1918 pandemic, in which most of the world was affected by W2 within a matter of a few weeks.
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