Investigators then looked at deaths in October and November 1918, the culmination of the city’s flu outbreak. They found detailed mortality statistics collected by the Census Bureau, then a relatively new bureau, and archived by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Faust identified 31,589 deaths among 5.5 million city dwellers, for an incident rate of 287.17 deaths per 100,000 person-months. This number was almost three times higher than the death toll of the city in the previous three years. In total, the death toll in the city last spring was about 70 percent of that seen in 1918.
When the epidemic hit in 1918, the spike in deaths was not as shocking for the city as in 2020. At present, the increase in deaths was less than three times higher than the previous year’s toll, the researchers noted. , while 2020’s turnout was more than four times higher than the 2019 figure.
Simply put, life was riskier a hundred years ago.
“It was a less healthy and less secure world,” said Drs. Faust. In one sentence, he added, “we are less today than in 1918,” because we started from a much safer, technologically advanced place. The impact of an epidemic today should be dramatically lower, not slightly lower.
Indeed, people today are conditioned by the ‘medical-industrial complex’ to think that all diseases can be overcome, said Nancy Tomes, a historian of American health care at Stony Brook University.
That may be why many Americans, especially those who believe the pandemic is too much, are so angry to find that a virus has infected their lives, she added.
