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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3591 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Top Ten Causes of Death

Yeah, i think you're right. That book on the spanish flu I've been putting off? Still putting it off.





b_b  ·  3591 days ago  ·  link  ·  

US didn't lose that many people in the war. Relative to our population, we lost slightly more than 0.1%, so even dying somewhat young as many of those men did, it would be hard to parse the signal from the noise. The flu? 0.7%, and you can bet that lots of the dead were babies, which weights the average down quite a bit. Interestingly, in looking up the numbers, I found some reports that say that about half the US soldiers who died in WWI actually died of the flu and weren't enemy casualties.