• Question: how many people died in the spanish flue

    Asked by anon-354695 on 8 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Kirstie Andrews

      Kirstie Andrews answered on 8 Mar 2023:

      No one knows for certain, but it is thought that between 10 and 100 million people died, and around 500 million people (one third of the world’s population at that time) were infected.

    • Photo: Edward Guy

      Edward Guy answered on 8 Mar 2023:

      The intersting question is ‘how do we estimate this number when therewere no tests for Spanish flu,and when it wouldn’t have been possible to test everyone anyway?’

      We do this by estimating how many people would have died anyway (based on death rates before the flu pandemic started) and estimating how many extra people died during and immediately after the pandemic. This is known as the ‘excess death rate’ and can be tricky to measure because there are so many other things that could affect this number, plus not every country kept accurate records of deaths back then anyway.

      This is why you see a range of numbers suggested, but 50 million is close to the average number of estimated deaths (estimates often range from 10 million to over 100 million).

    • Photo: Orode Aniejurengho

      Orode Aniejurengho answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      I think it was around 500 000 000 (500 million). That’s a lot.

    • Photo: Louisse Mirabueno

      Louisse Mirabueno answered on 22 Mar 2023:

      Around 500 million people apparently! (I do have to be honest though, I had to look this up as I wasn’t sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu 😅)

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