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It is like an unstoppable force when you hear about your kid’s classmate being sick in school and within days the virus spreads and sure enough your kid comes down sick the following day and then you as a parent become sick just two days later. You can almost watch it spread like a flame with human hosts the kindling as the virus jumps from host to host.
Fortunately it is only a common cold, but this is why there is such fear and panic with the potentially lethal flu virus like the flu pandemic of 1918 also called the Spanish flu. The Spanish flu killed between 50 and 130 million people and is considered the worst natural disaster in human history. It is said some 500 million people were infected, this is about 28% of the world’s population at the time which was only 1.86 billion. 3% of the world’s population actually died from it.
The Spanish Flu caused so many death’s because it stirred up your own body’s immune system so badly, causing a cytokine storm. Due to weaker immune systems children and elderly actually were the lowest death rates compared to young healthy adults who had stronger immune systems.
Despite how far science has come along, how quickly could we react to viruses or flu’s that mutate and spread so quickly, constantly mutating to be more efficient and bypass or adapt to anything we can throw at it.
So as my whole family caught just the common cold from it spreading through my son’s class, I couldn’t help but wonder what if something like that type of flu comes back around?
-Justin Germino