What was most noteworthy about the pandemic of 1918?
The disease was exotic and unusual.
Millions of people died in a short time.
It was concentrated in a very small area,
This pandemic was not something exotic or unusual, such
as bubonic plague, malaria or cholera. It was influenza:
plain-old, every year, flu. Yet this strain of flu killed more
people in a shorter time than any disease in world
history. In 10 months, it snuffed out somewhere between
21 million and 100 million lives, compared to the 20
million soldier and civilian deaths in all of World War I.
It reached into every corner of the globe, annihilating
Eskimo villages in Alaska and killing one out of five
people in Western Samoa. Nationally, 675,000
Americans died, or more than in the Civil War. The flu
killed more Americans than all American wars from
World War I to Iraq.
-Seattle Times, 2004
It mostly affected soldiers in the military.